Did anyone else think of Star Wars during the bar scene full of aliens at the end? I kept waiting for Obi-Wan Kenobi to whip out his light saber.
I kinda glazed over a little bit during that episode. Is my understanding of the ending correct?
So right at the end we learn for the first time that some sort of nuclear weapon was being primed, and now that it’s shutdown the radiation needs to be vented. And for some reason it’s vented into a glass booth.
The door is locked as a safety thing, but can be opened by transferring the radiation to an adjacent booth.
Unfortunately the only way to transfer the radiation is by actually getting into the adjacent booth, where presumably there’s a “transfer radiation to this booth” button located inside, effectively making it a Futurama suicide booth.
If so, it’s incredibly lazy writing.
Going back to Pt. 1 for a moment: the whole Barack Obama thing was weird. They were treating him like he was the Prime Minister of Britain or something. Or worse, he was President of the World. For awhile I thought maybe Barack was World President, and there was some weird alternate time/universe thing going on. Was it Donna’s fiance who was jumping up and down saying “Barack’s going to end the recession tomorrow!” Huh?
Were they just making fun of Americans’ seemingly out-of-control fanatical religious-like devotion to Barack as Savior?
At least they pronounced his name right. I watched an Aussie show the other day and they pronounce it BARE-ik.
I thought it was a great send-off for Tennant’s Doctor. I’m really going to miss him. I didn’t have any problem with the nuclear radiation bit. He has a time machine! Him visiting everyone could have taken only 10-15 minutes or whatever. Plus don’t forget that right before getting the radiation he plummeted from a spaceship through a glass ceiling landing on a hard floor. I’m sure that didn’t help. I’m glad they let him have a farewell with everyone, as he really deserved it. And come on, his acting in this episode was fabulous! His last line had me sobbing. I didn’t want him to go either!
I liked the short bit of Matt Smith there was at the end. And I know Moffat will be great. My only concern is that this really is the end of an era, as the whole creative team is leaving as well. I read that even Murray Gold is leaving! I just don’t want the show to become completely different with only the name & backstories in common.
Yeah, that was totally the Mos Eisley cantina.
Here is the trailer on YouTube for those who can’t access it on the BBC UK site.
I liked the conclusion, a low key affair considering the last few finales.
In 2003, Tennant appeared in Bright Young Things–Stephen Fry’s version of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. His character was named Ginger Littlejohn. I always thought that was the source of the remark.
I’ll need to watch this again; thanks to BBCamerica, that won’t be hard. Glad to see Wilf get to go into space. And Donna get a happy ending. Loved the spaceport bar, filled with every critter from the show–plus Jack & his new friend.
The Doctor is Dead. Long live the Doctor!
Obi-Wan is gay ? :eek:
I bet there was a lot of sobbing on set, too.
Favorite single line: “WORST! RESCUE! EVER!”
I laughed so hard at that scene. “Not the stairs! Not the stairs!!” I’m glad there was a bit of humor in there before all the sadness.
Though it didn’t come off as incredible as season 4’s end, it held a lot more meaning.
A let down? Not considering. The Master yearned to remake the lost Time Lords and when he saw what became of them after the Time War he fought it. Cudos.
Likewise to Tennant’s Doctor. He had everything he wanted, saved everything in incredible ways, but lost it all. He was at the end of his rope, and said as much in that he’d lived too long. He loved who he was and was desperate to survive but had no actual reason to. Unlike the 9th Doctor, who simply accepted it was time, he fought the change. It was sad and powerful.
One real-life and one not: Tennant is actually dating Georgia Moffet. Look it up.
In-universe, the thing that makes me wonder about an emotional confrontation is Jack. The Doctor has the oft-used option of avoiding death and remaking himself to avoid centuries of emotional loss and torment, yet Jack has already outlived him and will live for billions of years from “now” and has no similar option. Damn, but that sucks for jack.
Well that was a lot better than I feared. Having seen RTD write himself into a corner, and then pull some sort of Deus Ex ending, I as very pleasantly surprised with this one. The payoff between
The Master, The Doctor and President Rassilin just worked. The Master realizing why he had been plagued with the drumbeats all his life was well worth the price of admission.
The DVR dropped out right after the regeneration and the line about not being a ginger; did I miss anything useful?
Mostly just the Doctor humping the Tardis, which then plummeted to Earth, presumably in the throes of orgasm. >_>
Did you get to the part where the Tardis chameleon circuit reset during the explosion? Even though it’s cute, I don’t think a honeybucket is very appropriate.
Alonzo looks something like Ianto (sniff!), or is that just me?
Not a whole lot, I don’t think. He’s similar in that he’s treading a line between cute and weird looking, but they don’t look particularly similar, IMO.
After giving it some thought years ago I’ve come to wonder why a goal of some science fiction is to become pure thought or energy. Look at lightning, or think about the electricity running through wires. Is is sentient? No. You think the Time Lords would know that it takes chemical and biological reactions, as well as electrical impulses to give us life, intelligence, sentience, and so on.
Also, the writers must not have watched episodes from the original run. The only thing that remains of Omega* is his will, and this isn’t portrayed in a good light.
Then, there are the Eternals** from the episode “Enlightenment”. They’re non physical beings who exist outside of time, but because of that they lost their imagination and creativity and depend on people who live inside of time to give them meaning and purpose.
Again, not portraying what the Time Lords were trying to achieve as something worth while. And surely the Time Lords should have been aware of all this.
A honey-bucket? No shit? 
Your name suits you 
Since this is a spoiler thread and the episode has aired in the U.S. as well as the U.K., I’m not going to box spoilers.
I really liked this episode overall and thought it was a great sendoff for Tennant. The fact that the four knocks had nothing to do with the Doctor’s nemesis pounding on a drum but was instead a kindly old man softly tapping was a beautiful payoff.
I think the Time Lords are back in their bubble that isn’t a bubble.
Was that supposed to be THE Rassilon? Isn’t he ancient history? Could calling him Rassilon have been meant as an insult, like calling someone who thinks he’s smarter than he actually is “Einstein” or “Sherlock”? Or was it Rassilon the LXIV?
The Master was threatening them. Maybe 6 billion Masters could have made good on the threat, but one could not. By restoring the duplicates to human form, “Rassilon” neutralized the threat. (Although I’m not sure why he couldn’t use the Disinteglove to destroy the Master.)
Actually, they saved the entire human race, even if that wasn’t their intention.
We don’t know when Mickey and Martha got married, or even when they started dating. I guess life goes on between episodes.
In some of those clips he’s actually wearing the remnants of Tennant’s costume.
The next Doctor can come and drop in on them any time he likes.Yes, but he’ll be the next Doctor. If you watched the old series, imagine visiting someone you were very close to when you were Peter Davison, but now you’re Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy. Not only do you look completely different, but your personality is very different as well. Could you really expect them to feel the same way about you? And would you feel the same about them? (Sarah Jane is an exceptional case, partly because she had been with the Doctor through a regeneration, and partly because she’s Sarah Jane.)
“Did I say her brain would blow up? I meant she’ll get a migraine, emit a powerful pulse of energy, and go to sleep for a while. Sorry if I alarmed you unnecessarily.”
Interesting although the headline has “to star as mother of Doctor Who” in quotes, it doesn’t actually say that anywhere in the article. It seems likely that she was, but I wish we’d have been given some kind of answer to who she was within the episode. At first I thought they were hedging their bets in case they wanted his mother to appear in a later episode played by a different actress, but since when has recasting a Time Lord or Lady been a problem?
Last report I saw, Russell T. Davies was saying that it wasn’t certain and John Barrowman had jumped the gun in saying it was.
It was nice that we found out Nurse Redfern was happy. Russell T. Davies really is a big softy, isn’t he?
I definitely took it as a pickup, which I thought was a welcome note of levity in a very melancholy series of scenes. But it was also quite touching. Let’s face it, Jack has carried a torch for the Doctor and gone through hell for him, and as often or not been treated like dirt. Doctor Tens last act was to help him get a little bit of happiness – and it was probably good for Alonso too.
Because there was more or it was a different type this time?
Well, this episode was filmed several months ago, and may have been scripted long before that. Having watched British coverage of the presidential election, I can assure you there were plenty of great expectations on that side of the pond. If the story had been written more recently, it might have been different.
He felt how long his hair was in back and thought he might have come back as a girl. After feeling his ears and nose he said, “I’ve had worse,” which may have been a poke at the Ninth Doctor. And as the Tardis plummeted, he shouted “Geronimo!,” which may be his new catchphrase.