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“This is my final victory, Doctor. I have shown you… yourself.”

The gang’s all here, fighting Davros and his pepperpots, but somebody’s gonna die… and after this finale, some fans might wish it was Russell T. Davies.

Plot Points – The Daleks reveal their masterplan: to wipe out everything, everywhere, leaving them “the only life forms in existence.” Meanwhile, the Doctor regenerates into himself, and Donna grows herself a whole ‘nother spare Doctor, all the better to fight Daleks with.

Doctor Who? – This episode pretty much puts an end to any speculation about, and/or canon-ocity of, the Doctor being half-human, a bizarre tidbit that was dropped in the 1996 TV movie starring Paul McGann, but which most fans have been happy to ignore ever since. Certainly if the Doctor were half-human it would have come up in all this talk about Time Lord/human metacrisis and the 10.5 Doctor being semi-human enough to grow old canoodling with Rose.  He finds the idea of being human “disgusting,” probably why Actual Doctor never quite wanted to get it on with the blonde chick anyway.  And again with the tiresome Superman imagery: the Supreme Dalek refers to the Doctor as the “Last Son of Krypton,” uhhh, I mean the “Last Child of Gallifrey.”

Hey, Hey, Donna – Every season finale, Russell puts in a great big “reset” button of some sort or another, and this year it’s Donna, who loses all her memories of her travels with the Doctor, and all her “growth.”  This has driven the fanboys & fangirls completely bonkers in the last few weeks since it aired on the BBC, but I actually think it kinda works: the idea is that Donna is capable of change, and that if her mother actually starts treating her like a human being, she might exhibit the same kind of growth and awesomeness that she got with the Doc. True, it’s a fairly ignoble finish for one of the all-time great companions (and yes, I’ve changed my tune from the days of “The Runaway Bride,” and I’m a big enough man to admit it), but since Tate was only ever signed on for a single season, it’s better than actually killing her, or marrying her off to some peripheral character, something that was done more than once in classic Who. However, all the emphasis on that big ring she wears has many fans speculating upon a possible return.

Rosewatch – The ‘shipper’ crowd finally gets what they want… sort of. Rose gets stranded back in her alt.universe again (supposedly forever, but that’s what they damn well said about “Doomsday,” and look how that turned out) with a pretty-boy Doctor to call her own who won’t regenerate into somebody uglier, and will grow old with her and make timebabiez with her and… ah, who gives a crap? I just need a signed statement from Steven Moffat that we’re done with Rose now. Forever. And ever. Look, in series one, I loved Rose – she was fantastic. But she was of a place and a time, and that time has passed. And with Russell departing the series, it’s a fair bet this character will finally leave us in peace.

Too Cool – Again, pretty freakin’ spectacular, with lots o’ exploding Daleks. On the other hand, you’ve got to admire the ingenuity of a “containment cell” that consists of just a spotlight beamed down onto the actor (with a couple CGI flourishes to sell the concept) as a cost-saving measure.

Weird Science – Time Lord/Human metacrisis. The hand. So many issues… brain… can’t… function…

Dumb Stuff – Ianto and certainly Gwen are firing their guns in a very tight line, and yet when they go forward to see the bullets caught in the Matrixy-time-freeze thingy they are all spread out across a wide area, as if they’d been swinging their guns wildly from left to right.  There seems to be a problem with countdowns in this episode. First, when testing the reality bomb, the Daleks do a Great Big Dramatic Countdown, at the end of which… they switch the machine on and wait for it to warm up. It’s another couple of minutes before it actually does something destructive (giving Mickey/Sarah/Jackie time to escape of course). Later, the Daleks start another countdown at 200 rels (we’re never given an exact comparison, but by context a “rel” seems to be about a second or two long) and then, just moments later – in what seems to be real time – they’re down to 40 rels.  Okay, Jack’s unkillable, but if he’s put in an incinerator, shouldn’t his clothes burn off? Not that he wouldn’t love that… (Speaking of Superman, maybe Jack has that same thing as Supes where he exudes a certain “aura” that keeps his clothes invulnerable as well.) And while we’re on the subject of Jack, when did that horndog ever hesitate to hug somebody?  Okaaay, the Daleks have always been the most xenophobic species in Who history, but what exactly are they planning to do with themselves once they’ve wiped out everything and everyone else in the universe? Take up macramé? Play computer solitaire? Pin the tail on the Dalek?  And if just hearing stories about the Doctor might jog Donna’s super-memory and make her spiral back into “my-brain-asplode” TL/Hmetacrisis, doesn’t it seem like actually SEEING him (and having him introduce himself!) might be an even bigger trigger?

And Possibly the Dumbest Thing NuWho Has Ever Done – Towing the Earth home. Don’t. Even. Get. Me. Started.

This Season’s Self-Sacrifice Tote Board: 6  No new entries (Jack acts like he is, but of course he’s immortal, so it doesn’t count), but I told you it was a theme: it even gets a montage in this episode, and notice how many of the dead people are women.

Classic Who – Turns out that Davros is not actually in charge of the Daleks after all, not too surprising given the effort to keep the Daleks threatening in and of themselves; the over-reliance on Davros in the classic series is one of the things that weakened many later Dalek stories, and keeping him as a “pet” of the Daleks is not a bad move overall.

Final Answer – Well, it’s an improvement over last year’s abysmal “Last of the Time Lords,” but not by a wide margin. “Journey’s End” is at least fast-moving and colorful amid all the bizarre plot twists that fly at us like baseballs at a batting cage.  Julian Bleach’s performance as Davros impresses once again, as do the spectacular production values. But the episode is still as nutty as a fruit bat. This is the first time all year that Catherine Tate has seemed too much like she is in The Catherine Tate Show, and the whole Doctor/Donna concept is too bizarre to take seriously, making the destruction of the Daleks far too easy. Russell once again paints himself into a corner, and can’t resist being all cutesy to get himself out of it, undercutting the drama of an impending Dalek conquest by having it foiled by SuperTemp. The Rose/10.5 Doctor coda is an eye-rolling moment, and Donna’s “death” (not a real death, the same gag Russell used in “Doomsday” two years ago) is profoundly unsatisfying, especially given the relative closure afforded to uber-perfect Rose. So many elements get rehashed from earlier stories that it almost seems like “Russell T. Davies’ Greatest Hits,” but I guess, giving his impending departure, we should have expected no less. It’s watchable, but vaguely annoying, and often baffling.

So What Happens Now? – As many of you may know, there will be no regular Doctor Who season in 2009 (to accommodate David Tennant’s run in a London production of Hamlet), and instead, there will be four specials over the next year-and-a-half: one this Christmas, one at Easter 2009, another unscheduled at this point, and one at Christmas 2009. It’s not known at this early date how the Sci-Fi channel will handle the broadcast of these specials, but one suspects, with no regular season to wait for, they may likely just show them shortly after they air in England. Chief writer/exec producer Russell T. Davies will still be in charge of these four specials, and then the regular 2010 series (back to regular production) will feature the debut of Steven Moffatt as showrunner. And not a moment too soon.

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