Next Who Sunday: End of Time, Russell T. Davies

The Master is back. You have to kinda love the sick bastard, especially in this episode where he’s completely mad but has flashes of what he once was.

Parts of this are so odd, you expect Simon Pegg and Nick Frost to show up. Plus the longest denouement in the history of television. I used to be really snarky about that long good-bye, but as I rewatched this, I realized it wasn’t Ten’s good-bye, it was Davies’. He was leaving a show he’d rebooted, creating something new and wonderful with two amazing actors, Eccleston and Tennant, and now he had to leave it behind. I think that’s why Ten says good-bye to everybody from the past four years and gives shout-outs to all the monsters; it’s Davies saying, “Goodbye and thanks for all the fish.” That anguished “I don’t want to go” wasn’t just the Doctor talking.

But having said that, “The End of Time” is an absurd mixture of opera and vaudeville with some Star Wars thrown in. Plus Wilf. It’s not as compact and well-crafted as “Planet of the Dead” or “The Waters of Mars,” but Davies had a lot of epic stuff to shove into two hours. Also, I think his four year reign was marvelous, so I cut him a lot of slack on this one.

And since we’re talking about writing, I learned this from Wikipedia:

Davies’s official role as head writer and executive producer, or “showrunner”, consisted of laying a skeletal plot for the entire series, holding “tone meetings” to correctly identify the tone of an episode, often described in one word—for example, the “tone word” for Moffat’s “The Empty Child” was “romantic” — and overseeing all aspects of production.[82]

I’ve asked students to give their individual acts titles before, but I’ve never thought of asking them to tag their work with one word for tone. I do remember that when I was writing Bet Me, I taped the words “Wildly Romantic” to the top of my computer to remind myself to swing wide. Now I’m thinking about that tone-in-one-word and how much it could do to clarify things. Must cogitate.