YMMV / Doctor Who S30 E17/E18 "The End of Time"

• Broken Base: This story generates a lot of division in Who fandom all on its lonesome, particularly the ending. To admirers, it's a fitting tribute to one of the most popular Doctors ever and the man who brought back the TV series and made it a beloved part of British culture again, which effectively homages the previous four years of the show and creates a beautiful Tear Jerker moment. To detractors, it's self-indulgent, Narmy and mawkish, suffers a severe case of tedious Ending Fatigue, indulges the Tenth Doctor's narcissistic, Wangsty and self-obsessed tendencies and even tries to sabotage the next Doctor. This is only made more divisive by later episodes such as "The Day of the Doctor", which have retroactively attempted to justify or recontextualize the more derided aspects of the episode.
• Continuity Lockout: If you're confused by the "knock four times" thing, or why Donna can't see the Doctor anymore, or why the Doctor is deliberately travelling alone, or what's up with this "Harold Saxon" everyone's talking about, then you need to watch previous episodes. Notably, when Doctor Who was on Netflix, "Planet of the Dead" and "The Waters of Mars" had their own separate Netflix entries as they qualify for being TV specials, and were not part of the running order as one might expect, meaning anyone who watched Series 4 on Netflix for the first time would have no idea about the "knock four times" thing, as it was introduced in that episode. Netflix did realise this mistake, and merged the two episodes eventually.
• Designated Hero: The Tenth Doctor comes off as remarkably unheroic in his last episode, coming across less of a legendary Time Lord and more like a whiny teenager, shirking off his responsibilities, refusing to kill the Master (an insane mass murderer) and throwing a temper tantrum over saving his friend's life, insulting him in the process. Even his last words are unheroic. Compare this to the exits of Two (forced to call on the people he was running away from when he found a problem too big for him to fix), Three (believed that facing his own fears was more important than living), Four (teamed up with the Master to save the universe and died in the process), Five (gave his life to save his friend) and Nine (the same, and his exit was also written by Davies). Of course, one could argue that this is precisely the point.
• Ending Fatigue: The Doctor has an incredibly drawn out regeneration. Instead of regenerating right away after absorbing all the radiation, Ten uses the time he has left to go around revisiting every single one of his former companions in a sequence that takes up nearly half the episode.
• Evil Is Cool: Even detractors will admit Timothy Dalton does an excellent job portraying Rassilon and making him feel intimidating and serious as an antagonist in an episode otherwise filled with goofy shenanigans.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • At the time the story first aired, many accused the Tenth Doctor of being a crybaby for the amount of seeming Wangst that he goes through over his imminent death compared to, say, the Fourth Doctor being clearly freaked out by the presence of the Watcher, but otherwise carrying on as usual. With later revelations about the War Doctor and it being established that yes, the creation of the Metacrisis Doctor did count as a full regeneration, it casts things in an entirely different light, since it'll mean that when the Tenth Doctor becomes the Eleventh, he'll have used up his entire regeneration cycle.
  • That and his final words might be referring to Trenzalore, sub-consciously. The Tenth Doctor died knowing the next incarnation was his last and deep in his head, he already knew the name of where that incarnation would permanently die as well.
  • The Master being implied to have rewritten the bodies of the dead to look like him. Four seasons later, the dead are harvested and turned into Cybermen... and guess who's responsible!?
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In light of the revelation that cross-sex regenerations are possible, the Eleventh Doctor's exclamation of "I'm a girl!" becomes a lot funnier. The Doctor himself would only have to wait a couple more regenerations.
    • On the same note, seeing the Master in a dress. Though it's pretty funny even as it is.
  • The Doctor spends the two parter terrified of regenerating, unsure of the man he will become and not wanting to die... completely unaware that he's already met his successor (and his Time War incarnation as well) during the Zygon Gambit with Queen Elizabeth. However, it's due to the out-of-sync timelines that Ten doesn't recall these events, and won't until Eleven reaches that point in his timeline. As do the audience.
  • Given the Tenth Doctor's insistence that his next incarnation is a separate person, any time the Eleventh Doctor refers to something he did as Ten (e.g, "I sent you back into the void!" from "Victory of the Daleks") can count as this.
  • The Big Bad is armed with a gauntlet that has the ability to warp time and space, and disintegrate anyone at will? Why does that sound familiar?^note (It should be noted that the Infinity Gauntlet appeared in comics nearly two decades before this episode aired, but its film appearance eight years later is the one that brought it into popular consciousness)
    • Doubly funny (or just sad) since when Thanos used it, it resulted in another infamous utterance of "I don't want to go."
    • In fact, in Hungary the Tenth Doctor and Bruce Banner/Hulk has voiced by same voice actor (Zoltán Rajkai).
  • "I don't want to go." As of "The Power of the Doctor", guess who's back?
• Ho Yay:
  • Part one gives us the chase through the scrapyard, complete with piercing stares and heavy panting, the Master zapping the Doctor with his new electricity powers and the Doctor writhing in pain. And when the Master actually hits the Doctor, he stops attacking and runs over to make sure he's okay. The two reminisce about them playing in fields on Gallifrey as children, before the Master becomes rather insistent that the Doctor must understand him, taking it so far as to initiate a mindmeld.
  • Part two is, between the return of the Time Lords and the Doctor's angst about it and his impending death, almost entirely filled with Ho Yay goodness. Their back and forth banter while the Doctor is locked in what can only be described as a bondage chair, the Master taking the Doctor's favourite species and turning them into copies of himself (showing he's still jealous), the Doctor seriously contemplating whether killing the Master is worth saving everyone (which Wilf calls him out on), and the Master's final act in the story being to sacrifice himself to save the Doctor. This exchange says it all:
    The Master: [shaking his head as his eyes fill with tears] Don't know what I'd be without that noise.
    The Doctor: I wonder what I'd be without you.
    The Master: [tearfully] Yeah.
  • When talking about the Doctor and Donna ("He loves playing with Earth girls!"), the Master is annoyed and bitter.
  • The Doctor's "You could be beautiful" monologue is dripping with homoerotic undertones.
    You're a genius. You're stone cold brilliant, you are, I swear, you really are. But you could be so much more. You could be beautiful. With a mind like that, we could travel the stars. It would be my honour. Because you don't need to own the universe, just see it. Have the privilege of seeing the whole of time and space. That's ownership enough.
  • On a podcast commentary, producer Julie Gardner says how she wishes the Master had looked back at the Doctor one last time before disappearing with the Time Lords, which prompts Russell T Davies to burst out laughing.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • There's a lot of photos with John Simm's head pasted on yay...
  • DINNER TIIIIIIME!!!
  • The Master caused the recession.
  • "God bless the cactuses!" "That's 'cacti'." "That's racist!"
  • "Worst! Rescue! EVER!"
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Rassilon and his Time Lord cronies crossed this when they put the sound of drums in the Master's head in order to make him a beacon to escape the Time War, driving him insane. If not for Rassilon, there would probably be no Master.
    • More than a few Expanded Universe novels and audio dramas have also tried to answer the same question of why the Master is the way they are. This includes (but is not limited to) "The Dark Path", "Harvest of Time", and the Big Finish audio drama "Master". All three mediums are supposed to be in the same continuity so all of them are canon. No wonder the Master is so messed up.
  • The Ultimate Sanction, which Rassilon and many of the Time Lords wanted to accomplish. It would allow them to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence... at the cost of entire existence.
• Narm:
  • The Doctor screaming "WELL, IT'S NOT FAIR!!!" and knocking things away is seen as a little over the top, but what really pushes it into Narm is that he starts slobbering in the act of saying it.
  • Rassilon making spittle fly as he shouts counts, too. However, it can also work to his favour considering it helps portray him as repulsive.
  • Anything and everything to do with the Master in Part 1, particularly when he's in the wasteland. The goofy CGI used for his sudden superpowers, John Simm devouring the scenery as quickly and ferociously as he's devouring the food ("DINNER TIME!!!" especially comes to mind), his rant about food towards the Doctor being shot like a Youtube Poop and the ridiculousness of his plot to transform the whole of humanity into himself (and the absurdity of the actual situation) makes almost every single scene featuring him in the first half almost impossible to take seriously.
• Narm Charm: Among the terrifying sounding entities that the Doctor lists as having been part of the Time War are the Could-Have-Been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres. Despite their somewhat mundane and nonsensical names, the Doctor's delivery of the names among the others and their context of the escalation of the Time War sells them as threatening.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Naismith and his daughter seem to have a lot of sexual tension going on, almost to the point of squick. Since the show is still aimed at kids, and the UST has no bearing on the plot whatsoever, it just comes across as random.
• Retroactive Recognition: David Harewood as Joshua Naismith, years before he played Warlin Door in Alan Wake 2.
• Strangled by the Red String: Mickey and Martha having been married off-screen, despite them never having had any interaction together before "Journey's End", and even in "Journey's End" they didn't have much meaningful interaction at all. Even worse, Martha was previously mentioned to be engaged to Tom Milligan, the guy she met in the Year That Never Was. It ends up looking like a bad case of Pair the Spares, and an even worse case of the Token Minority Couple.
• Tear Dryer: The Tenth Doctor's melancholic farewell scene is followed immediately by Eleven manically and energetically going through his new body and dealing with the now burning TARDIS. It also effectively serves as a transfer between Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • At the end of Part 1, the only two humans who haven't turned into the Master are Wilfred, and his granddaughter and former Companion Donna...and she's starting to remember! OMG! Are we about to see the return of the Doctor Donna? Maybe she'll find a way to keep her memories and stay alive! At the very least she's bound to play a key, pivotal role in Part 2, Right? Right?? Wrong. At the start of Part 2 she gets chased around a little, then some Applied Phlebotinum the Doctor left in her brain kicks in, knocking her and her pursuers out, and she doesn't wake up (and isn't seen onscreen) until after the main crisis is over, and she wakes with her damn amnesia still intact.
  • We never saw Wilfred's late wife. Literally just shoehorned in as a sparse mention by her widower in his last appearance, but it's clear she meant a lot to him. We know the Doctor went back to go see Geoffrey Noble before he did, and we knew the Doctor was going back to see all his old companions and tending to help Donna and her family out of impoverishment, so wouldn't have been a nice touch to see Grandma Mott and cap off things by seeing her leave her grandchild something, too?
    • On top of that, we saw the Brigadier show up in The Sarah Jane Adventures, so why not have the Tenth Doctor and him meet on-screen while they could?
  • Considering the Doctor's conflicting feelings regarding his people and trauma from how he was forced to end the Time War, you would expect him and Rassilon to have a lot more to say to each other regarding the latter's plan to save the Time Lords.
• Wangst: As mentioned above, many viewers find Ten's angsty, melodramatic refusal to accept his death and regeneration irritating instead of tragic, especially compared to the relatively graceful way most of his predecessors (as well as his successors) faced the same fate. However, many have changed their minds since later episodes revealed that because of the War Doctor and the Metacrisis Doctor counted as part of his regenerations, he was approaching his final life... and as "The Day of the Doctor" showed, he subconsciously knew what lay at the end. Then again, by this logic his successor was his last life entirely, and he still managed to react to impending death a lot more gracefully. Though having centuries to come to terms with it in comparison to the relatively young Tenth Doctor who only had a year or two at most to deal with being on one last regeneration and news of his impending does make it more excusable.

---