[Alexus]

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:

A 3673 word review is just off the top of your head? Holy shit

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

I think it was very necessary. All the characters have changed in that year, and a year is long enough for the Master to put in place a regime that frankly shouldn't have been allowed on TV at 7pm. Jack is grimy and seems to be constantly executed, the Joneses are indentured servants. A very effective scene was where the Master demands Francine say sorry for trying to overthrow him, and she screams it out through gritted teeth as if she'd trying not to break down weeping; that year has changed them all. Especially Martha.

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.

In the Middle Ages they didn't have any form of media that wasn't either books no one could read or shouting. They also had this 'Jesus' bloke, he was pretty well known by about a quarter of the world's population. Word of mouth is a very powerful thing indeed: just look at the spread of religion.

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.

I thought the portrayal was just as good, but that's only my opinion. To the second point, that is the whole point of this incarnation of the Master. He's completely apeshit bonkers, and he seems to be doing a lot of things just for the sake of doing them - because it's fun. Have you never danced around to a song like an idiot when you're alone? As RTD says in the Confidential Ep, the Master is like a teenager in his bedroom. Also, got to stress the point again that he's utterly, utterly insane.

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.

Delgado was a good Master indeed, and it's terrible he died at such an early age.

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.

Makes sense to me. They're slaves to a madman who has burned whole countries for a giggle, and they have no one else to talk to. Eventually they're going to iron out their differences over some cold mashed swede and murder-plotting, or go mad.

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.

I was confused at first, and then thought "Woah." After all, Time Lords can live for thousands of years, but they have to regenerate every 400 or so (i.e. Doctor 1) so they don't conk out. Suspend those regenerations, and you basically have a 1,000 year old William Hartnell, and if he wouldn't look like a cross between Gollum and a walnut, I don't know what would. Also - the Doctor isn't human. Important thing to remember when he survives having all his blood drained (I really don't get that myself) or being stabbed in the heart but managing to restart it (after being STABBED?)

Also, it is consistent with the Master's program of Doctor-torture by making him helpless and then forcing him to watch the end of the world. Make the Doctor the Gallifreyan version of a parrot in a cage, it's going to hurt him.

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?

She needed a way to persuade Doherty that the gun was real, and since she's a member of 'the Resistance' she must have resources.

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?"

However, you're not a casual viewer or a six year old. Is Johnny Scoggins, age 10, going to remember every plot point from TSOD? I doubt it. Also, only one of said flashbacks was as long as you say. I didn't see any recycled lines that weren't used for dramatic effect.

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 found it dark and unremittingly bleak. The Doctor, with so much faith in Humanity, is always saying how wonderful we are, and the show has always been optimistic about mankind, and it turns out they become these things? It was a very effective move in my opinion, much better than my thought that the Toclafane were the trapped souls of Time Lord children.

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),

It would still be a Parodox if they did that as it would be changing history and thus their past, and doing that wouldn't hurt the Doctor as much, which is something the Master desired very much.

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.

They've "cannibalised themselves" in a desperate attempt to survive. Like the Cybermen with the emotional inhibitors, how else could you stay 'sane' after becoming a head in a ball other than making your mind simple enough that you didn't care?

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.

I think you've forgotten what utter shits little children can be, if you actually honestly think that.