Journey's End

[owl]

Well, I was right along with that episode up until the coda.



I don't like the way Rose ended up. She spent her whole time in the Peteverse trying to get back to the other world, and she ends up literally in the same place she was at the end of Doomsday. On the other hand, there is potential there: she's got what she thought she wanted, a version of the Doctor reduced to humanity and mortgages, but it has the potential to go so wrong.

Is anyone else disappointed that the baby Tyler wasn't called Sam? It would have been a nice little nod, seeing that Sam of Life on Mars got his surname from Rose!

OH DONNA NO NO NO! It was heartbreaking to see her reverted back to her Runaway Bride personality. And the poor emo Doctor all on his own again.

Having said all that, there were some parts in the action that were a bit good. Sarah Jane was great—nice balance between saving the world without the script forgetting that she has a kid now, and I loved that they referenced her previous experience with Davros.

Jack and Mickey insulting each other and hugging, and then Mickey going, "Okay, enough hugging".

Rose saying "Oh, she's good" re Martha. Yay for the end of the jealousy thing.

Was anyone else thinking, "The Doctor and Donna have reproduced!" or was it just me?

Donna's horrified "You're naked!"

Jack contemplating what to do with three Doctors, on in the form of Donna.

Dalek Caan is still good for a laugh. And DoctorDonna was funny until you realise it's all going to have to end horribly.

K-9!! I have a soft spot for that tin dog. So shoot me. :D

Daleks over Nuremburg, saying EXTERMINATE in German, were absolutely chilling, considering that the Daleks are Nazi analogues.

What was going on with Martha and the German woman? Between the accent and the bits in German, I was somewhat lost. ETA: Someone on lifeonmartha has translated it. "Martha, you're going to hell."/"I know." Oh, Martha!

I loved that she put out the warning before destroying the Earth, which was fortunate as it ended up preventing her/UNIT from doing it.

Looks like she and Mickey will be joining Torchwood, what with the way they both went off with Jack.

Interesting that Davros pointed out how all the companions turn into soldiers.

I loved everyone piloting the TARDIS and the happy music and everyone hugging. I think the Doctor needs multiple companions more often.

Yay Tosh's invention saving Gwen and Ianto, and the reference to Gweneth from the first series. Although I thought that someone had said that she wasn't an ancestor?

DONNA. MY DONNA. WOES.

Comments

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I know. I will really miss Donna. And yes, I wondered whether all the 'we're not a couple' running jokes had been put in there because they ended up reproducing.

I'm kind of 'eh' about Rose ending up with a Doctor-lite. At least it gives her arc some closure, I suppose, and it's not like I have to read any of the 'picking out curtains in a parallel universe' fic.

[crazy-vasey.livejournal.com]

I thought it made last year's season finale look good. My reasons are as follows:

1) Daleks - totally neutered as villains. That was the worst they've been in decades, and, lo and behold, it came in the Davros return episode(s). Surprise. My optimism of last week was woefully misplaced.

2) Rose, Jackie, and Mickey - totally superfluous. The only reason for their presence was to provide an irritatingly cheesy and character destroying happy ending for Rose and to give a cheap out on

3) Sarah Jane was similarly superfluous, but at least wasn't nauseating.

4) Could say the same for Jack and the Torchwood idiots, too. Except the Torchwood idiots are nauseating by virtue of the horror show that was the seven episodes of Torchwood I watched before writing it off as being utter garbage. Bad associations.

5) The Dalek plot. Idiotic in ways that defy description. Great, you'll be the only creatures left in existance. You'll be the only anything left in existance. Have fun dying a cold, hungry death in a universe with not a shred of exploitable resources left.

6) Cheap, CHEAP cop-out on every single aspect of the cliff-hanger ending.

7) Didn't even provide a fun, whizz-bang spectacle. That was last week's episode.

All in all, I'm now extremely happy that RTD is buggering off to somewhere else where I'll never again have to watch any of his nonsense come the end of these special episodes.

[owl]

You just know there's going to be so much of that kind of fic from the more rabid sections of the community. Personally I think the train wreck version is more interesting.

[owl]

All in all, I'm now extremely happy that RTD is buggering off to somewhere else where I'll never again have to watch any of his nonsense come the end of these special episodes.

I think you have just expressed the sentiments of 80% of the fandom.

Personally, I was never optimistic about IT'S DALEKS AGAIN. Four goes in a row was too much. And it looks like we're having Cybermen for Christmas, oh joy. New villains, people! At least perhaps the creepy robot Santas will be absent.

[crazy-vasey.livejournal.com]

I'm a massive Dalek fan - they're just such wonderful villains - but New Who seems to have totally ran out of ideas on how to use them. Woe. Maybe the next team will give us a Dalek episode that isn't awful. We can but hope.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Have you read Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels? In that, the anthropomorphic personification of Dream is a bit prone to cluelessly saying to infatuated females 'I could give you a dream of me', to which they mostly say 'No thanks'. Rose getting the Doctor-lite reminded me a bit of that.

I did like the bit about the Doctor-lite being like the Doctor Rose first met, but... either he's got nine hundred years worth of memories and accumulated Time War trauma but he's not a lonely god any more, he's just a bloke, in which case is he really going to be able to settle down happily with Rose? or he's just someone who looks like David Tennant, in which case her settling for him looks a bit shallow, and I hadn't really thought of the Rose we got in the first two series or the gun-toting, parallel-universe-saving Rose in this one as shallow.

I suppose he could have a kludge of the Doctor's memories and Donna's, but that just leaves Rose with a man who's very good at typing and kind of fancies Jack.

[owl]

I was so keen on Dalek, and the Daleks vs the Cybermen in Doomsday was okay, but after that it just went downhill with great rapidity.

I don't think they'll ever be as good now as when we saw them in the old series when we were four.

[owl]

I suppose he could have a kludge of the Doctor's memories and Donna's, but that just leaves Rose with a man who's very good at typing and kind of fancies Jack.

I LOL'D. There is a lot of fic potential in this set-up. I hope some of the better writers in the fandom latch on it, and don't just go off scunnered.

[crazy-vasey.livejournal.com]

Their plan was a mutual destruction scenario. Even Dr. Who magic-tech can't make something out of nothing - as we see in Utopia, the universe dying kills everyone - and the Daleks have never been the sort to deliberately destroy themselves. It's one thing to exterminate all non-Dalek life-forms, it's quite another to destroy the entire universe and leave only Daleks alive - the second scenario is totally unsurvivable.

[whywastewords.livejournal.com]

I had for so long convinced myself that Rose Tyler was getting on with her life in Alt Earth, kicking ass and taking names, that when I found out she was just trying to get back to the Doctor the entire time, I was very, VERY shocked. I still can't quite squeeze that into the personal canon I've had since Doomsday of Rose being awesome in Alt Torchwood. *sigh*

I liked Rose's ending, because it wasn't a happy ending. It wasn't any happier than Doomsday when she was left sobbing and alone. It's an ending that's just as heartbreaking and sad, because (again my own personal canon talking here) Rose's love for the Doctor was tied into the travelling with him. He's gives her the love part in the form of Human Ten and she's STILL devastated because that's not what she wanted. She wanted the real deal, the travelling and the love.

[crazy-vasey.livejournal.com]

Because they've turned the entire multiverse into a giant void. Where would they get the energy, the organic matter, the ores required to keep their civilisation going? It's the Utopia scenario of S3 writ large.

[crazy-vasey.livejournal.com]

The Daleks in the S2 two-parter were only in the void for a relatively short time, presumably, as the Doctor doesn't seem to have significantly aged since his seventh incarnation (still in his 900s). There's a great difference between that and going the rest of eternity with no new inputs of energy or material to your civilisation. How would they power their self-repair systems without any energy inputs, at least? They're not entirely self-sufficient or the Dalek of the episode with the same name would have been long, long gone by the time the Doctor showed up.

[drjeannette.livejournal.com]

Was anyone else thinking, "The Doctor and Donna have reproduced!" or was it just me?

Not just you. I had to pause the episode momentarily and shout: "They had a baby Doctor! Kind of!"

Especially after the whole "Not married" thing all season, it was kind of satisfying. ::grins::

[owl]

Every series, I know. Give the poor pepperpots a rest!

[owl]

They had an ickle baby DoctorDonna!

[owl]

Yeah, me too. I want Rose to be awesome without the Doctor, and not all clingy and obsessed, bah.

You're dead right about it not being a happy ending. It's getting what she thought she wanted (the Doctor tamed and humanised to her level), and finding it wasn't really what she wanted.