Oh, dear. What has Russell T Davies done to my precious Doctor Who? How can I even begin to cover my disappointment in this travesty?
Alright, here we go. I apologize if I've missed anything -- this is just off the top of my head:
First of all, why was it necessary to jump forward in time a full year? It seems thrown in and slightly out of place, especially considering how all the main characters (save Martha) are acting at this point in time. Jack is still having a laugh, the Master is still extremely excitable, and the whole situation seems pretty new to everyone. I just think this particular plot device was pretty unnecessary, and that a month would easily have allowed the same type of development, except for possibly...
The whole "Martha Jones becoming a worldwide legend" thing. That struck me as ridiculous from the first time it was mentioned. I find it preposterous that in a world that now exists without television, without internet, without media of any kind, a person and story like Martha's could not achieve anywhere near the worldwide fame and reputation necessary to set any of the following events in motion.
The portrayal of the Master in this episode was considerably weaker than that of the previous two episodes, especially towards the beginning, right after the one year jump. The Master is so excited about this situation, which should be old news for him, so I have no idea why he's jumping up and down dancing to music like he's hearing about this for the first time. After a year, he should have come to terms with it pretty well by now. On this same note, seeing the Master jump around like a buffoon makes me miss the sort of cold, detached, controlled Master we used to have with Roger Delgado. Not to say Simm is bad (quite the contrary, I love him in the role), but you'd never see Delgado approaching anything close to this kind of behavior.
I also find it a bit cliche that Martha's mother and father would fall in love again or get back together or whatever, even after these events. I know stuff like this tends to draw people together and I certainly understand that stuff like this
could happen, but I don't think it would happen with Martha's family, especially after she just said in the previous episode "you'd never get back with him in a million years." It just smacks of RTD's overt sentimentalism, which bothers me.
The mini-Doctor. Oh dear. I don't honestly know what that was supposed to be, or what the point was of doing that, but I can safely say that my initial reaction was not a positive one -- in fact, it was somewhere between confusion and laughter. Everyone in the room didn't know how to react to that, because it was just weird. I don't see how aging the Doctor even extremely far into the future would cause him to degenerate into this freaky mutant baby thing. However, I don't want this post to be entirely negative, so I will say that the CGI was good. But the mini-Doctor was ridiculous, and no level of awesome CGI will cover for that.
What the hell was up with Martha's anti-Time Lord gun? We established that it wasn't real, so then what the hell did she have with her that she was showing off? Did she walk over to her local shop and buy a water pistol and some food coloring just to throw off that professor? I mean really, what the hell? Where do you even get food coloring in a post-apocalyptic world?
Not sure where to throw this one in, so I'll list it here -- there were a
ton of repeated and recycled lines from The Sound of Drums that were reused here in Last of the Time Lords, and there were also a whole lot of unnecessary flashbacks to the previous episode. Some of them went on for 20-30 seconds and I just sat there, thinking "okay, it hasn't been
that long since I saw Sound of Drums, can we keep moving please?"
The Toclafane, or whatever you want to call them -- I was extremely unimpressed by the so-called dramatic reveal of what they were supposed to be... I mean, humans from the future? That really just sounds and feels like an attempt by RTD to write something dark and disparaging and it really comes off as more of a joke. I rolled my eyes when it was finally revealed that they were humans. Their motivation for destroying themselves in the past made little sense (why can't you just start a
new empire somewhere away from Earth rather than destroying yourselves in the 21st century? the whole paradox plot in general bothers me the more I think about it, as it seems totally unnecessary to bother creating a paradox machine when you could instead just move away from Earth and create a galactic empire five light years down the road), and I hated the way the Toclafane were portrayed. They seemed to force their own regression to a childlike mode of behavior, which is very strange, considering they seem intent to dominate the Earth and create a galactic empire. I wouldn't trust a five-year-old to rule the cosmos and I'm surprised the Master and the future humans thought it was such a great idea.
The timeline for the Master's time on Earth is very sketchy and somewhat confusing. We know for a fact that at the end of Utopia, the Master left the year 100 trillion and went back to Earth in the present day. But we also know that two major time-consuming processes had to take place just after that -- the establishment of the Harold Saxon entity in the public consciousness on Earth, and the enlistment of the support of the future humans from Utopia. We also know that on at least one trip to Utopia, the Master took Lucy with him. I've been trying to piece it together and no matter which way you look at it, it doesn't fit together nicely.
Here is perhaps one of the biggest plot flaws in the entire episode: how the hell did the Master meet up with the future humans from Utopia? Did he snap his fingers and say "you know, let me check up on those humans that went to Utopia, maybe they evolved into some kind of savage murderous race that I can enlist to help conquer and wipe out Earth in the present day!" It just seems way too convenient and I don't see how he would have just met up with the future humans by pure chance, and there was no reason for him to be looking for them in the first place.
And another Utopia-related biggie: how did the Master get from the Futurekind world where the human colony was set up to Utopia? He couldn't have used the TARDIS, because it was locked between only two locations: the Futurekind world in 100 trillion, and Earth in the present. So that leaves some kind of local space travel, but there was no rocket left on the world, and it was so difficult for Professor Yana to create his rocket in the first place that it's not at all feasible that the Master would be able to set up something similar on his own, especially lacking any kind of motivation (see above -- why go to Utopia?). Also, there was likely almost no technology left behind on that world from which to construct such a rocket. Additionally, there would have been no way for the Master to meet up with the future humans from Utopia except by going to Utopia, because the humans had absolutely no reason or motivation to return to the Futurekind world.
Perhaps the worst-written and worst-executed part of the entire episode was the Doctor's return from being hyper-aged by the Master. First off, the entire concept is based on Martha Jones being able to get practically the entire human race on the entire planet Earth to think the word "Doctor" at exactly the right moment. Even before we get into the technical details, I already have a major problem believing that something like this could happen. This also brings up the detail of the countdown -- how would the entire human race somehow know exactly when the Master initiated his countdown (or Martha or even the Doctor, for that matter)? It seemed to be entirely on the Master's whim when to initiate the countdown. It would have made much more sense to have Martha tell everyone a specific date and time to think the word "Doctor" rather than telling them to wait for some vague nonspecific countdown that they couldn't possibly actually know when it was running and it when it had hit zero. Now, to get into the reasoning behind such an action. Supposedly, the force of five billion people all thinking the word "Doctor" at the same time, was somehow going to psychically do something to the Master's Archangel network, and then the Doctor was supposed to somehow be in tune with the Archangel network, from which he was able to restore himself to his previous un-aged form (including all of his clothes, by the way). The idea that a large group of people thinking a word, even at the exact same point in time (which, if you'll notice, didn't even happen -- everyone said "Doctor" across nearly a 30-second span, which is still pretty good considering they should have had no idea when to say or think anything) could influence a network of satellites that were designed to subtly influence voting UK citizens to like and trust Harold Saxon to then transmit some kind of psychic energy to the Doctor which is powerful enough not only to restore him to his previous form but also to give him a few minutes worth of Superman-like powers is extremely preposterous. There is no sense anywhere in this, and I'm amazed Russell T Davies actually managed to create a script from these ideas that was apparently "good enough" for the production team to put out.
Character limit reached -- continued in next post...