DOCTOR: Hello.

DAVID: Get back or I'll use the gun.

DOCTOR: Yes, I imagine you will. You like guns, don't you.

DAVID: This is a specialised weapon. It's designed for roof duty, designed for long range. I've never used one up close before.

ALEX: Let him go.

DAVID: No.

DOCTOR: No. In fact, let him come a little closer.

DAVID: Stay where you are.

DOCTOR: Why? Scared? Why should you be scared? You're the one with the gun.

DAVID: That's right.

DOCTOR: You like guns, don't you.

ALEX: He'll kill you.

DOCTOR: Of course he will. That's what guns are for. Pull the trigger, end a life. Simple, isn't it.

DAVID: Yes.

DOCTOR: Makes sense, doesn't it.

DAVID: Yes.

DOCTOR: A life killing life.

ALEX: Who are you?

DOCTOR: Shut up. Why don't you do it then? Look me in the eye, pull the trigger, end my life. Why not?

DAVID: I can't.

DOCTOR: Why not?

DAVID: I don't know.

DOCTOR: No, you don't, do you.

(The Doctor takes the gun from David.)

DOCTOR: Throw away your gun.

(Alex drops his gun.)

“There was a man curled up in the corner, trying to hide himself behind a bowler hat and not succeeding very well. He had a little bit of ink on his hands, but wasn’t nearly as grubby as the other men. I went over and asked him if he was all right. He started muttering ‘I must obey, I must obey’. Very zombie. The Doctor asked him who he must obey, and he said ‘the Queen’. Which the Doctor said was an admirable sentiment, but what did the Queen want him to do? And he said, ‘kill’, which I didn’t think was very admirable at all.”

‘Any other last-minute pearls of wisdom?’ Gwen asked him. ‘Only I’m getting drowned out here.’

‘That’s nothing,’ said Toshiko. ‘You should see it in Cardiff now. Much heavier than here, and still deteriorating. The worst seems to be confined to the Bay area. It’s like a microclimate.’

‘Microclimate as in “tiny amount of sun”?’ retorted Jack, and put the SUV into gear again. ‘We might as well be in Manchester.’

“"Your ship’s causing this typhoon. Launching it would generate a tsunami that would barrel down the Bristol Channel and out into the Atlantic. On the bright side, I grant you, that would wipe out Bristol. But you know I won’t let it happen."”

Finally only one little boy stood, waiting with the stranger to go over.

‘I can’t do it,’ he wailed.

‘What’s your name?’ the stranger asked.

‘Gahnna.’

‘Well, Gahnna, Rojan and all the others did it.’

‘I’m scared.’

‘Yes, I know,’ he replied. ‘And being scared is good. It’s brilliant in fact, because it pushes you to do things you wouldn’t normally do.’

‘I can’t!’ Gahnna repeated.

‘Yes, you can,’ the stranger said. ‘Trust me.’

‘Why?’

The stranger looked up, caught Rojan’s eye and smiled.

‘Trust me because I’m, well, I’m sort of a doctor.’

BILL: Doctor, you okay?

DOCTOR: Bill, I've got no TARDIS, no sonic, about ten minutes of oxygen left, and now I'm blind. Can you imagine how unbearable I'm going to be when I pull this off?

“‘Because you live in a time machine. All of history is still happening outside those doors. On a good night that means everyone you ever met is still alive and you can’t wait to see them again. On a bad night, it means everyone’s dead, and you want to charge around the universe, pretending you can do something about that.’ She looked up at me. ‘I know which version of you I prefer.’”

There was a town, on the southern shore of Lake Calasper, ripped apart by a giant earthquake. No one should have survived, but everywhere the people ran, they found a police telephone box standing in front of them, opening its doors.

A tornado tore through a tiny village, till a ring of blue boxes spun round the storm in the opposite direction, shrinking it into the ground.

As cities and towns and villages burned all around the planet, blue boxes came hurtling through the smoke, rescuing people from windows and rooftops.

A sky transporter, plunging towards the heart of the Capitol was suddenly being piloted by a funny man with big ears and a black jacket. Everyone on board stared out of the windows, as he climbed along the wing, to rewire one of the engines.

A ship on the high seas, about to capsize, was suddenly captained by a strange little man in a frock coat and check trousers, who kept offering people gobstoppers and complaining about his aunt being giddy.

There was a man with a ridiculous umbrella, who evacuated a school as a mountain crumbled towards it, and kept everyone laughing as they ran. A gentle cricketer took command of a hospital on fire, rescued the patients and completed an operation, as the flames licked at the theatre door. A man with a cloud of white hair and a swirling cape stood on a beach and, with a tiny silver rod, froze a whole tsunami as it thundered towards a town. A laughing joker in a colourful coat led a party of miners out of the tunnels that had come crashing down around them. Four children, trapped on the side of a cliff face, knew beyond doubt that no one was coming to their rescue, till the end of an absurdly long scarf dangled down in front of them.

I was everywhere I was needed that day, across all my lives, and I believe I have never run so fast. If I sound proud, forgive me: it is the inverse of the shame I carried for so many years. This was the last day of the Time War, but it was no longer the worst day of my life. Instead, this was the day the people of Gallifrey rose up and put 2.47 billion children safely to bed. This was the day I remembered who I was, and swore never to forget again.

This was the day of the Doctor.

“I have no idea how long I stood there. An hour perhaps. Or a minute, or a day. Time takes on a different meaning when it is measured in the heartbeats of the billions you are about to destroy.”

I said we’re not the same. Here’s why. All my life, every day, I’ve wished I was someone else. I’ve wanted to be Kate, or Sarah Jane Smith, or Amy Pond, or anyone really. But you’re a shape-shifter, you’ve been lots of other people—and you want to be me. I think that makes you a much better Petronella Osgood than I am.

I think I’d like to be a better version. If the Doctor can’t always be a hero, we’re going to need a few more, right?

The last day. The floor tremored at his feet. Were there shockwaves coming out of the painting?

The last day. He was back on Karn, so many faces ago, and he was drinking the poison, ready to walk into the storm.

The last day. The desert was hot beneath his boots, and a tiny barn shimmered on the horizon.

The last day. Elizabeth of England tilted back her face to be kissed, but it wasn’t really her.

The last day. He was trapped in a cell with two old men who hated him, but the shadows hid their faces.

The last day. He was standing in a gallery, and Clara was asking him if he was okay.

“I don't know how it happened, it turns out Stathe- Stacey was a Love Wraith from the planet Succuba.”

Did you know you can only fold the same piece of paper in half seven times otherwise the universe breaks? Well, on the eighth fold, those lovely theatre seats were sucked in, along with the floorboards and the joists.

On the ninth fold, all those spiffy corridors the Doctor and Donna were running through – they got pulled in too, in a splinter of doors and a tearing of carpet and a shattering of light bulbs. Ah, well, guess I’d never have got round to changing them.

On the tenth fold, the Toyshop went – dolls and trains and trucks and skittles and dice all squeezed down from four dimensions to one, my puppets only having time for one final wave before they were gone.

Yes, thought Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, maybe I am a Nepo Baby. She’d grown up watching her father save the world. Well, she would have done if he’d ever been around. But he’d been too busy. Saving the world. It had been a strange childhood. Spent waiting for glimpses of him. That tired smile on his face after a long day. Patiently listening to her excited babble about finger painting while he’d been – well, she’d read the files. Gel guards. Axons. Devil Goblins from Neptune.

Once he was down to pick her up from school. Late, of course. She’d been standing alone at the gates, bored as ever, and glancing around to make sure no one saw him roar up in a military jeep. Instead, it had been a yellow clown car driven by a wizard. ‘You should never get in cars with strangers,’ he’d told her as she’d got in. ‘But Alistair’s a bit busy.’ Funny, hearing her father’s name. She pulled the face. She’d spent her whole life being told her father was a bit busy.

They’d roared off down the road, the man next to her smiling and talking and somehow passing her a bag of sweets while holding his hat on his head. ‘Little bit of a problem with giant cockroaches and Didcot power station,’ the man had laughed. ‘Can’t be bothered with that. So I said I’d drop you off at Ballet Class. Which I absolutely can, of course.’ A pause, and a friendly wickedness lit up his features. ‘Or … we could go dancing with Anna Pavlova?’ And that had been the first time Kate Lethbridge-Stewart had met the Doctor. Now she’d inherited the family firm. Holding the world together with duct tape and the most brilliant people she could find. Just in case, this one time, the Doctor didn’t turn up and do what he did best.

Save. The. World.

“That was the thing about the TARDIS. It had a drag queen’s sense of timekeeping, always making a big entrance, just a bit late.”

“The first time she’d met the Doctor, she’d told him to stop. He’d stood there, surrounded by fire and the screams of giant spiders, and back then he’d looked like he could go on burning for ever. Now he was a cheap tealight.”