Thanks to @aljeensane on Twitter for the image. I've woken up this morning struggling to remember last night's Doctor Who finale.
All I know is, for almost all the whole thing, I was thinking "this is rubbish".
Until the scene near the end where Ruby meets her mum and Russell T Davies does that Starbucks bit "that's me", and I was dewey eyed. That was a reminder that RTD can be a magical writer when he wants. But the preceding 45 minutes were bafflingly poor.
Take a pinch of Avengers Infinity War (oh, like absolutely everybody wasn't thinking that, when everyone turns to sand).
Add a dash of the first Superman movie (obviously, you thought, all these people are going to come back to life, so it's really just a question of which variation on Superman making the world spin backwards he chooses).
Take the fan service but make it look like Blue Peter (the Memory Tardis, which was fine for those DVD-extra lite mock scenes with old Doctors and companions last year, may be a more interesting design than the current vacuous bland and empty main Tardis, but its sole purpose of reminding viewers that we're watching a continuation of an old TV series only serves to distract from the story you're watching).
Add a soup con of very very boring people sitting round and talking. I mean yawn.
Then just be silly. Looking at a TV screen with Pyramids Of Mars on? So your whole life really was enacted on wobbly sets with saturated lighting and 1970s video?
What, Sutekh was wrapped round the Tardis all the time, in every story for the last fifty years? What, even when Clara was going back in time and appearing in every story for the last fifty years as well? Was he wrapped round that dying Tardis in that Trenzalore nonsense, when the Doctor's last Tardis mysteriously still had Matt Smith's design? And all those times the Tardis gets destroyed, and dissolved, and blah and blah. Never so much as an "ouch" from a big Sutekh?
A Sutekh who was waiting for what? For a Doctor who cries every week? Or for an earth where there's actually two Doctors now, but for some reason David Tennant's Doctor is sitting there in his back garden going "nah, can't be arsed, you sort it out yourself"? (And, by the way, he also has a Tardis. Is Sutekh wrapped around that one too?)
Oh and what was that nonsense about Ruby being named after road signs? Like we were told she was in her very first episode? What's the next companion going to be called? Acacia Resident Parking Only?
This series has had four of the best episodes in years, I've been raving about them. Boom, 73 Yards, Dot & Bubble, and Rogue were all top notch, and I quite liked Devil's Chord and could tolerate Space Babies. But this two part finale was a frustrating flop, and left me wondering if this is really going to capture the imagination of a new generation of viewers. My experience in schools is that hardly any kids even know the show is on. It certainly hasn't grabbed them like I imagined it would.
I thought 2024 was going to be 2005 all over again. Turns out to have been more like 1996. Remember that year? They made a Doctor Who TV movie to appeal to the Americans, and it didn't take?
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