Last of the Time Lords

Jesus f**king christ

Last of the Time Lords is a pretty serious let-down after all the excitement and energy of Utopia and the Sound of Drums. Martha running around the world spreading the word of the Doctor and turning him into some sort of psychic messiah through the Master's technology is impressive as a feat for her character, but still a little underwhelming. It's always annoyed me that Martha is a medical doctor who never really gets to show off her very useful profession over the course of Series 3. It's disappointing, as is the way this episode kind of just erases everything from the Master's rule over Earth. It makes the story feel a little cheap.

Speaking of cheap, the Doctor does not look good in this episode. A lot of those effects just don't look that great to me. John Simm was fun collapsing in on himself by the end of the episode and has a great reveal here with the Toclafane, but the larger episode feels a little awkwardly acted overall and it really doesn't hold up as a finale that well at all. It's not terrible or unwatchable, but definitely a bit of a missed opportunity as up until this point, we had a really strong string of episodes and Last of the Time Lords really could have capped everything off nicely.

A trilogy of diminishing returns. And it really shouldn’t be given the excellent characters and concepts on display throughout. The real outlier of course is Utopia which is of incredibly high quality, the tension slowly ramps up throughout the story in this dystopian fantasy land. Captain Jack is back and suddenly at odds with the Doctor which is a dramatic treat. The tension between him and The Doctor really sparkles. Then we get one of the series’ all time best reveals - the amazing Derek Jacobi turns out to be an unwitting, secret iteration of The Master! My word. Following Blink and Human Nature I felt a bit spoiled.

The Sound of Drums begins well enough. The Master as Prime Minister is a dastardly treat. But it loses touch with reality shortly after and the pacing goes down the toilet. Aging The Doctor, then aging him even further in Last of the Time Lords does nothing to serve the plot. I’d say none of the amazing characters RTD had introduced over his time as showrunner really got much of anything interesting to do in the last two instalments of this story. Martha travelling the world talking to people about The Doctor… is that an interesting character motivation? And the embarrassment I still feel watching the Jesus like resurrection of The Doctor transforming from a shrivelled up old nubbin to a triumphant young Tennant whilst people shout “Doctor” in unison. My God. That is bad TV.

It feels wrong to rate these tangentially connected stories as a single whole - but some guy on Totally Doctor Who once said they were a single story so we’ll treat them as such!