Next Who Sunday: Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways: Russell T. Davies

The Who finales are always epic, but this one remains my favorite. It’s legitimately hide-behind-the-couch scary, equally funny, puts Our Guy and Our Girl front and center and throws a nightmare of Big Bads at them, and the pay-off at the end is searing and satisfying and right, tragic and true. We’ve talked a lot about endings in the McDaniel class, but the big takeaway is that if the end doesn’t work, the rest of the novel/story/episode/series is toast. It’s what everything that has come before has been building up to. It’s the Big Finish, the Payoff, the Climax in every sense of the word. Davies very carefully built the whole season to culminate in this two-parter, layering the Doctor-Rose relationship so that it could only end in this way, building all the characters so that their actions here are the sum of everything that has gone before. Davies does what Joss Whedon always did, he ENDS the season, he doesn’t shill out his narrative with a tacky cliffhanger because he knows if he delivers at the climax, his audience will be back. Cliffhangers fall into the same category as prologues and epilogues; they’re weak writing, a sign of a writer who doesn’t trust his or her audience. One of the great things about this two-parter is that while it’s both an ending and a beginning, it makes the season complete, a unified whole, a great filmed novel. So let’s talk about endings this week, along with everything else.

Fun fact: There’s a “Bad Wolf” mention in every episode of Season One (and several after that in later series) although some are so hidden they’re hard to find.