As the Wrath fleet spread across the galaxy, the Doctor returns to the Drashani system and finds himself caught up in the terrifying consequences of his last visit. With a range of allies of varying degrees of trustworthiness, the Doctor has to take various desperate gambits to bring everything together and end the threat posed by the Wrath once and for all.
This is the conclusion of the Drashani trilogy, that began with “The Burning Prince” and “The Acheron Pulse”.
Tropes:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Doctor is forced to concede that his efforts to help the Wrath failed despite programming them with his own morality because they lacked the necessary intuition to acknowledge that there are various shades of grey in any moral situation.
- Anachronic Order: From the Doctor’s perspective, anyway; based on the way he reacted to events, it would appear that, for the Doctor, he experienced the first half of Part 3, then Part 1, the second half of Part 3, Part 2, and then Part 4 in that order.
- Batman Gambit: Kylo works out why the Wrath want him and the Doctor and attempts to use that plan to fulfil his own agenda.
- Clone Angst: Aliona is shaken to learn that she’s just the latest clone of the original Aliona.
- Gone Horribly Right: The Doctor turned the Wrath into upholders of justice by providing them with his own moral code as a template, but they have now reached a point where they will conquer entire planets, essentially operating on the principle that everyone is guilty of something if you look hard enough.
- Happy Ending Override: After "Acheron Pulse", the Doctor thought that he had given Prince Kylo a chance to live a peaceful life while the Wrath became a force for good, but he soon learns after his arrival in this timeline that the consequences of his actions are anything but.
- Morality Pet: The clone of Aliona serves as this for Kylo in the end, as the revelation that she’s alive prompts Kylo to abandon his plans for revenge as he would otherwise kill her.
- Never My Fault: As in their last encounter, Prince Kylo blames the Doctor for everything that has happened, even though he was the one who created the Wrath and forced the Doctor into a difficult position in the first place.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Basically everything that happens here occurred because the Doctor didn’t consider the potential consequences of his actions last time he visited the Drashani Empire.
- Out-Gambitted: Prince Kylo thinks that he’s outmanoeuvred the Doctor, only for the Doctor to reveal that he knew how Kylo was going to react to everything that was happening and come up with a counter for it.
- Playing with Fire: Kylo has by this point mastered his control of fire to mount more precise attacks, whereas before he could only cause massive bursts of fire that could be as risky for his allies as his intended enemies.
- Shout-Out: When the Doctor regains consciousness after faking his death, he claims that he was just “pining for the fjords”.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: The Doctor experiences this entire adventure out-of-sequence, allowing him to basically improvise a plan to defeat the Wrath while everyone else thinks he’s putting together an elaborate Batman Gambit.
