YMMV / Doctor Who S30 E13 "Journey's End"

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Crossing over with Fridge Brilliance, the Doctor's refusal to regenerate could have been selfishness...or it could have been that he didn't want to deal with a whole new body and the post-regeneration confusion and craziness that always follows it when dealing with the Daleks.
  • Popular among the non-fans of Rose is that the Doctor was actually terrified of how far she'd gone to get back to him, and was fobbing off a cheap copy of himself on her in the hopes that it would satisfy her and she'd never put the multiverse in such danger again.
• Ass Pull: This story features some of the biggest Ass Pulls in the history of the show:
  • The Doctor is able to stave of a regeneration by sending regeneration energy into a severed hand. This means it grows into a half-human Doctor with the Doctor's mind when a human touches it. Then when the human touching it is electrocuted she suddenly gets Time Lord intelligence, Just in Time to stop the Daleks destroying the Universe. While this event was foreshadowed (the "Doctor Donna" was hinted in "Planet of the Ood" and Dalek Caan mentioning a "Three-fold man") this new ability comes off as New Powers as the Plot Demands that was greatly disliked. It would take until 2013 for Moffat to pull an Author's Saving Throw by revealing it still counted as an official regeneration, bringing the Doctor one step closer to his supposed thirteen life limit.
  • The control panel in the Vault is capable of doing whatever the plot needs it to at any given moment. Whilst much of this is because Donna is capable of thinking of things to do with it nobody else would have thought of, it is not even mentioned in the script before she uses it to shut the system down, and the metacrisis Doctor is able to blow up all the Daleks and destroy the Crucible simply by pulling a lever on it.
  • Picture Jack Harkness coming back from the dead: he catapults up and gasps for air, right? Not when he decides to go undercover as a dead guy by getting shot by a Dalek, apparently.
• Broken Base: Some fans see this as an epic work of Russell T Davies, tying his work together, while others see it as a self-indulgent mess more like a shipping fic. Rose haters hated Rose somehow getting the Doctor and say she was unnecessary and just there to be a Mary Sue, while many people who liked Rose felt it was a poor follow-up which negated what many thought of as one of the best companion departures.
• Ending Fatigue: The farewell scenes partially led to the episode overunning by twenty minutes.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Davros describes the Doctor in a Break Them by Talking lecture as "the man who abhors violence, never carrying a gun. But this is the truth, Doctor; you take ordinary people and fashion them into weapons." In Jessica Jones (2015), David Tennant plays Kilgrave, who does just that, albeit less willing on the victim's part.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "THE DESTRUCTION! OF REALITY! ITSELF!!!"
  • The scene with the Doctor standing out in the rain looking very forlorn has gone viral as a GIF. It is often paired with the scene of the Dalek under the bunker sprinklers from "Dalek". Also of note is that some people have edited the gif to avoid showing water dripping off the tip of David Tennant's nose.
• Narm: The last scene features staged rain. It's pretty obviously they've turned a rain machine on full blast above David Tennant when you notice that his clothing becomes wet alarmingly quickly, even for a torrid rainstorm. There's also the fact the water starts dribbling off his nose, as mentioned above, which takes away from the somberness of the scene.
• Narm Charm: The scene of the TARDIS being piloted by all of the new series companions at once and towing Earth back to its proper orbit is undeniably cheesy. It is also undeniably, utterly awesome, and a fitting climax to the last full season of David Tennant's and Russell T Davies' era of the show, before they gradually wind their era to a close in the "Specials" year that follows.
• Strawman Has a Point: The Doctor is disgusted when his clone destroys the Dalek fleet and treats him like a monster, even though the Daleks are fanatical mass-murderers who never negotiate and letting them live would inevitably lead to countless more deaths. They had just come close to destroying the universe and it probably wouldn't be too difficult for them to try again, considering from what we see the Doctor was just willing to leave them like they were, when it probably wouldn't be too difficult for them to recover. We later see that a few Daleks surviving rebuild their race, which has led to a lot more death and destruction throughout the Universe.
  • There’s an argument that the Time Lord 10th Doctor didn't really mean it, he was just making an excuse to leave the Human Doctor with Rose in the parallel world. The Doctor has both a martyr and a god complex, he believes he’s sacrificing a chance to have Rose back for what he thinks is her own good. He does this by trying to manipulate Rose into choosing to stay in the Parallel world with the Human Doctor by saying things about the Human Doctor needing her to make him better.
  • Or alternatively, having seen the Time War and not remembering the true outcome of the Time War as revealed in "The Day of the Doctor", he's petrified that his part-human incarnation has all the same darkness of the War Doctor, that he's "born in battle" the same way, and wants him somewhere he can't really do any grand scale harm - and with someone who'll distract him from doing so.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The supporting casts of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures - Gwen Cooper, Ianto Jones and Luke Smith - don't get much to do and are confined to their respective locations.Both Rhys from the former show and Clyde and Maria from the latter show don't even appear, despite them being mentioned in the previous episode.

---