Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Dr Who S4 Finale - SPOILERS!

Well. ) and didn't stop till the credits.

I am so sad to see Donna go. But I note with some small hope how the way was written to have her come back. Perhaps. Wilf and her Mum know what happened and can revive her memories if necessary. I know the Doctor said that if that happened her brain would implode, but, hey, this is SF! A way can be found around that if they want to.

I always figured that CT would only do this season. She's still got a thriving career going outside the show. But the next season of DW is in 2010 - by that time, who knows? Perhaps she'll be ready to reprise her role.

I have hope we haven't seen the last of Donna, that's all I'm saying.

Also...question. I noticed a kind of strange ring on Donna's finger when she was on the phone at the end. For some reason I'm missing, at least one review I've read of the finale thinks this could mean Donna is the Master. I'm blanking on any connection. I know there was that hand the plucked a ring out of the Master's funeral pyre, but the details escape me. Was it the same ring?

It's curious, I'll say that. And another sign, perhaps, that Donna still has adventures with the Doctor to come in the future? (Although, hopefully, not as the Master. <G>)

Yup, still hoping...

I have to say that, overall, this season has been the Doctor's finest for this viewer. I've enjoyed every single episode - with the exception of Midnight, which bored me to tears. Once again, Moffat's two parter, SITL/FOTD was the highlight for me - packed with amazing ideas and moments. But it was ably matched by RTD's finale arc. Episodes I'll watch again and again. Wonderful.

LabRat

PS - Wendy and Kae, I've been reading your blogs on the finale - agree with every word. Thanks for the interesting reviews.

I know what you mean. I was so surprised at the end to notice it was pouring outside... an hour earlier there was definite sunshine! And it didn't even feel like an hour.

Eve Myles played Gwyneth in The Unquiet Dead, ep 1x03. The connection was never made in Torchwood, yet it was always speculated. Well, it was pretty much obvious. But now it was finally confirmed.

I absolutely agree with you that Donna should come back. I love her! She's been brilliant. I think she's even better than Rose, but my shipper's heart will always be with her and the Doctor in this show.

The last three episodes were fantastic. Glued to the screen. RTD rocks. But it does make me a bit afraid of S5 without him. I'm not a big fan of Moffatt, but I will give him the benefit of my doubts. And I have hopes of Jenny returning. There's still so much potential there!

Well, I could go on and on... but alas, my time is restricted. (I need the sleep to get me through work tomorrow :p ).

Saskia

Yes, I ran across the answer on TV.com while checking out something else. I'd known Eve Myles played both parts, but it hadn't clicked until then. I love these little nods to the fans that they include now and then.

I'm a huge fan of SM, so I'm the opposite - eagerly waiting to see what he does with the job. As for RTD, I cannot believe that the same guy who penned the mostly dreadful finale for S3 is responsible for S4's. It's because he's so hit and miss for me that I have issues with his scripts. Now, if he wrote all the time like these three episodes, I'd be a huge fan of his, too. But then you get something like Midnight <shudder>...

Yup, my thoughts exactly. I was glad that they chose the path of good friends for the Doctor and Donna. It was the perfect match for them and I don't think the pairing would have worked half as well if they'd had some kind of romantic connection.

LabRat

I won't repeat my finale thoughts here; they're on my LiveJournal. But I was amused by this:
because I loved Midnight, for a number of reasons - the Doctor completely vulnerable without his companion to help him, and unable to use his greatest asset (his mind) to win people over to his side; and then that wonderful moment at the end with Donna. Beautiful! And I absolutely loathed with the fires of a thousand pits of hell Moffat's two-parter. I was bored by the 'monsters', found River Song the single most irritating character ever to appear in DW and hated (yet again) Moffat's habit of sidelining the established companion in favour of his Mary Sue guest-star.

As for the finale, although I did enjoy it I am still angry at Donna's fate. To see her reverting to the way she was in The Runaway Bride is so incredibly sad - and the Doctor didn't give her a choice. Okay, it was all he could do to save her life, but she was pleading with him not to As for Rose, while I'm delighted that she gets an ending with the Doctor (Doctor2), yet again she got no choice in her own destiny. The Doctor's done that to her now in each season finale she's been in. Three times he's made decisions for her and not once asked if she's okay with them.

Donna's ring: no, it's nothing like the Master's. His was circular and had a design on it - here it is:


Donna's is oblong and plain grey in design:


We were shown it a lot. But they have a habit of doing that in DW - leading us to believe that certain things are important yet they're never referred to again. The hand picking up the Master's ring last year, for example, may or may not be significant. Depends if Moffat wants to make it so. Likewise Jenny being alive. Sometimes they're left trailing just in case a future writer wants to make use of them, and sometimes they're just red herrings.


Wendy

I enjoyed the first and last scenes of Midnight with Donna in them, but as for the rest of it...

Bleah.

I realise that it was supposed to be a deep psychological study of how basically good people can, in a heartbeat, turn into a baying mob, able and willing to do the unthinkable, when their survival is threatened but, well, been there, done that. It's a plot theme I've seen done a thousand times before on other shows and most of them did it better. So I found it a pretty unoriginal plot.

The problem I often have with RTD's scripts is that I detect a thread of 'Look at me, aren't I clever?" in them which irks me. And I found that in Midnight, which was the other reason I hated it. Yes, I guess all that repeating doubletalk was cleverly done, but the trouble was it was also mindnumbingly boring to watch. After a couple of minutes, I was muttering at the TV, "Yeah, yeah, we get the point, move on!". So it was a shame it went on...and on...and on...for another 20 minutes. Or, at least, it sure felt like 20 minutes.

The final reason I was bored by it was beyond RTD's control, so can't really be fairly levelled as a criticism and that was that it removed the one element which made the rest of the season so enjoyable for me. Donna! <G> I know that for production reasons couldn't be helped, but nevertheless it was a factor in making this the dud of the season for me.

Moffat's two parter, on the other hand, had some very intriguing, original ideas, which has become something of his hallmark for me. I think that's mainly where RTD falls down for me - I find the ideas and plot themes in his scripts to be mostly very unoriginal.

Glad to hear that the ring has no significance for Donna being the Master. Even if it had looked like the Master's ring, I couldn't quite work out where the connection would be.

LabRat

I enjoyed Midnight. But it also went so *fast*. I couldn't believe that it had been 35 minutes when I looked at the progress. Not having commercials every 10 minutes makes a difference. I do like watching the mental breakdown of man, so I enjoyed that part of it.

When it came to SE, I'm afraid that if I'd been younger, my mother would have washed out my mouth and smacked my hands. Those evil three words. I enjoyed seeing all of the companions together, and bringing the three shows into the mix. I feel so, so bad for both Donna and the Doctor at the very end, for all that they've lost. I'm sticking to the belief that Donna can find her brilliantness again underneath the lost memories.

They've got what they need for a Donna return if they want it - the computer at the Library. All they need do is say that a backup of her memories was kept there. So if she starts losing it the Doctor can go there again (going to the mainframe on the moon rather than the library itself to avoid problems with the natives) and zap her mind with those memories, which do not include the bit where she was briefly a Time Lord. No problem.

I doubt that the ring is significant, although I did at one point wonder if she and it were components of the Key to Time, a Time Lord gadget of infinite power that was split into sections and turned into a variety of objects including a woman in season 18(?) of old Who.

Over here in the States, we just saw "Midnight" on the SciFi channel this past Friday. I thought it was tight, powerful, and intense. But it lacked one of the things Donna told someone (Jenny, I think) earlier this season that she did a lot of.

Running. Nobody ran anywhere, not even inside the tour bus.

I also thought it was significant that the Doctor used his sonic widgit on the mind-numbing "entertainment" and then suggested that everyone talk to each other. He's just a party waiting to happen.

This Friday we get Donna and Rose together. I'll have to record it for my daughter, who is a definite Doctor/Rose shipper (even though I don't think she knows the term).

"Midnight" looked to me like a bottle show. For those of you who don't know the term, it means a show with a minimum of sets, action, and special effects, usually scheduled so the show can pay for bigger effects or sets or higher-priced guest stars in other episodes. RTD was probably writing with these constraints in mind, and when you can't do big action, big special effects, and big guest appearance fees, you're stuck doing either procedural or psychological stories.

I thought the episode was very touching in the end, both when the Doctor and Donna were talking about what happened and she repeated something he'd said and he all but demanded that she not repeat him, and when the Doctor asked the rest of the passengers the name of the hostess and no one knew it. The tour company would know, of course, but it was significant that an anonymous person sacrificed herself to purchase the lives of people she didn't know and probably would never have seen again if this tragedy hadn't happened.

I understand the reasons for Midnight were less about budget constraints than that Catherine Tate was unavailable as she was filming on Turn Left - an episode very Donna-heavy - so they needed to come up with a story that focused on the Doctor alone and used CT minimally. Hence, CT only being in the first and last scenes.

Like I say, I get that it was supposed to be a deep psychological study, but it just didn't work on that level for me and that was mainly down to what was, imo, a very clunky, unoriginal script from RTD. I can't fault at all the acting in it, which was very well done from all concerned. And it's a pity because those kinds of psychological episodes are often great favourites of mine. I usually would have enjoyed this immensely, if it had been done with a degree of flair.

Interestingly, aside from the first and last scenes with Donna, which I've already mentioned, the only moment in the entire episode which did work for me and which I did like is the one you cite, Terry - where no one knows the name of the heroine who saved them.

LabRat

It was both with Midnight, actually. Every season bar the first has had one episode which is Doctor-light (and usually companion-lite as well): Love and Monsters in S2, which I hated other than the Jackie scenes, and Blink in S3, which I would have liked more except that it felt completely out of place in the continuity and mood of the season at that point (a common problem with Moffat scripts).

This year, they elected to split Donna and the Doctor up and have both a Donna-light episode and a Doctor-light one. So Midnight was when Donna was filming Turn Left, as LabRat says, for which the Doctor was hardly needed. But Midnight was also the 'bottle show', the low-budget episode; they have to have two or three of those every season, and Midnight, with so few locations and very little in the way of special effects, was very low-budget indeed (though, as the Confidential tells us, the sound-effects people had a lot of overtime on this episode).

I can see that the lack of Donna would be disappointing - because, yes, she was amazing this year. But for me that didn't matter so much, partly because of what the episode revealed about the Doctor without his companions (and why he needs them so much) and also for the last five minutes. She was absolutely wonderful in those scenes, especially the way she didn't even need to ask what happened before realising how badly he needed a hug, and even more so that he felt comfortable enough to admit that he wasn't all right and to tell her what happened. Absolutely adore that part of the episode




Wendy

Just about anything I could write about Midnight has already been said by LabRat. That was an example of RTD's writing at its worst -- clumsy, so obvious that you could see what was going to happen right from the start (so why bother watching?) and with plot holes and lapses of internal logic that rivalled Crisis On Infinite Earths in magnitude. And lousy characters, too.

Compare it to The Stolen Earth and the subtle, clever, logical way that he built up to the end-of-episode cliff-hanger. Looking back, what he was doing seems obvious, but at the time it was neatly hidden in amongst all the other larger plot threads. So he can do it; it just seems that he gets these bouts of so-called "cleverness" (which turn out to be nothing of the sort) and they spoil things. An example was the first half of Partners in Crime with the parallel investigations: the ultimate resolution of that was brilliant, but what led up to it was so obviously an exercise in choreography a la French farce that it had me just wishing that he'd get on with it. Praise the Lord and pass the Fast-Forward button...!

And then there is his obsession with torturing the Doctor, and with the idea that being around him is dangerous. Yet again, we have the inability to deal with the concept of a hero, much less a competent one, that pervades so much of modern media, from Smellville to Harry Potter. For the nth time, Davies rendered the Doctor helpless and pounded home his "message" with all the subtlety of the proverbial hand grenade in a bowl of oatmeal. Can someone please tell me why we had to put up with Davros, of all people -- the insane creator of the worst genocidal mass murderers in the DW mythos -- accusing the Doctor of turning his friends and allies into weapons and murderers and no-one objected?!?!?!

RTD has done a wonderful job but, after that, I'm glad he's going before he can plumb any further depths of hyper-angst for characters that I have come to love -- even if most of them have now been effectively written out. Hopefully, Moffat, the writer of two of my favourite episodes and a man with a penchant for introducing a little romance into his stories, will be able to keep up the standards set by RTD but without imitating his bad habits.