#Jack loves David so Much it isn’t possible to contain that warmth to himself

[liliesyonder]

thinking abt David and Jack and warmth and family (again)

[must-be-brooklyn]

Paint splashes

Ship: Javid

Words: 1.5k

Era: Modern au 

-o-

In which Javid are very in love, do some painting together and I enjoy making it as fluffy as possible.

-o-

The paints were always stored in the weirdest places. David had come to terms with that in the four years since he had moved in with Jack. Letting out a quiet sigh, he scanned his eyes left to right, across each long shelf that was filled with Jack’s art supplies.

“Jack!” he called, and paused for a second, waiting for a reply.

There was a distance shuffling of feet as Jack yelled back to him. “What?”

“Where are the watercolours?”

The door swung further open as Jack pushed his way into the spare bedroom. He held his hands aloft; bubbles clung to his wrists still and they shone with water that he had not properly dried. A tea towel was slung over his shoulder.

He raised a teasing eyebrow at David and pointed to the top shelf. “Far left,” he said, “Under the pencil box.”

“Why under the pencil box?” David muttered under his breath. He extracted the tin carefully - it was completely obscured from view by pencils - and stepped back. How Jack knew where any of his stuff was defeated David. To him, it looked like a system of ‘where ever it fits, it goes.’

David turned towards Jack, who was wiping away the last bubbles with the tea towel. “Do you need paper, as well?”

“Uh, yeah, can you grab some?” Jack replied, sending him a bright grin. “Next to the reference files.”

He grabbed a few sheets and followed Jack back to the main room, which contained everything except the bedroom, bathroom and spare room with the cupboard where Jack kept all his art supplies.

Jack returned to the sink and began scrubbing a glass while David put everything onto their small paper. He frowned at it. “Is that everything we’ll need?”

“Brushes?” Jack suggested, not looking up from the washing-up.

David sighed and clapped a hand to his forehead. “Brushes,” he repeated, walking back to the cupboard.

“Next to the acrylics!” Jack shouted after him. “The ones with the green handles!”

Muttering under his breath, David took a few minutes to return with the brushes. By that time, Jack was already spreading out the paper and paints he had already gathered, putting them into specific areas that he liked, and accompanying them with a pristine glass of brush water and a pencil.

“Awesome, thanks, Dave,” Jack said, beaming as he took the brushes from David. He held them up to his eyes and scrutinised each one. “You’re still joining me, right?”

David let out a quiet laugh. “Only if you want me too,” he said.

Jack grabbed his hand, squeezed it, and pulled him the few steps back to the table. “Of course, I do,” he said as he pulled David’s chair out for him and pushed him into it. “I always want to do stuff with you.”

He sat in the chair next to him and handed him one of the brushes David had collected. “Okay, so you should use this one to put some water all over the paper before you start,” he said. He looked like an excited puppy, with wide eyes that sparkled with happiness and a grin that was infectious.

David took the brush from it and dropped it into the water.

As Jack took him through the different brushes, and finally gave him the pencil, David found himself unable to stop smiling. He loved listening to Jack, lost in the world of his beloved art. Every time he saw Jack’s eyes light up like that, he felt like the luckiest man in the world, so completely undeserving of being Jack’s husband.

“Got it?” Jack asked, finally pausing. “Oh, wait, I can put some music on, too.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and fiddled his way to the music app.

David nodded, scanning the range of things in front of him. “Sure. But, this isn’t going to be pretty.”

“Anything you do will be amazing,” Jack said, glancing up from his phone screen.

Giving him a raised eyebrow, David picked up the pencil.

Jack backed off with a laugh. “Okay, even if it isn’t amazing, I’ll still love it, at least,” he said, and then tacked on, “That was in our wedding vows, right?”

“Something like that,” David agreed, putting the pencil to the page of thick, watercolour paper that sat in front of him.

Some soft, floaty and vaguely romantic music floated from Jack’s phone and he set it down next to him. Taking up his own pencil, Jack slanted his paper and began to sketch. David could not see what it was from where he sat, but he did not worry himself trying to find out.

Jack drifted into his own, relaxed world, and so did David. The music set the tone, and David could not think of a single place he would rather have been than sitting next to Jack right then, on the eve of their wedding anniversary.

Unlike the hundreds of hours that Jack spent filling art commissions, this was simply for fun. He had asked David if he wanted to join, too, in a spur-of-the-moment question while they washed the dishes that they had eaten their dinner off together.

David had not taken an art class since high school (which he had hated. The teacher had been a nightmare), but it was easy to fall into an easy rhythm. Where there were no rules, no end goal and Jack sitting next to him, David had no reason to worry about how his art ended up. It could have been the ugliest painting in the world, and he knew Jack would gush over it, even he was laughing and teasing as he did so.

The song changed, and David’s head snapped up, his brush pausing mid-stroke on the page.

“This was our-.”

“First dance, yeah,” Jack said, smilingly at him with soft, brown eyes. “I know.”

David’s heart melted into goo as his whole body filled with a wonderful warmth. Words could not describe how much he loved Jack. It was like a flame inside him, licking at his skin and kissing all of his thoughts.

Jack hummed the song softly and continued to drag his brush, forwards and backwards across his page. The colours of a rainbow shone on his page, glistening in the light that shone above them.

David stared at him, lost in the moment. He wanted to freeze time and live in that moment forever. Everything felt right.

“I really, really love you,” he suddenly blurted, still looking at Jack.

Jack gave him a dazzling smile. “I really, really love you, too,” he replied and then launched head first into singing the chorus of the song at the top of his lungs.

David laughed and joined him, struggling to continue to paint at the same time as Jack was doing.

A few more songs passed, all of which Jack sang along to before he spoke again. “You done?”

David looked at his slightly limp trees that looked strangely out of place before a dark, looming background. It looked more like Cirith Ungol than Cerin Amoroth. “Done as I’ll ever be.”

Jack pushed his chair away from the table and walked over to David, peering over his shoulders.

“It’s good!” he proclaimed, immediately, but David could hear the laughter in his tone.

He glanced up at him. “Do you know what it is?”

Jack’s chortles launched into reality. “I’m getting an impression of trees?”

“Close enough,” David said, laughing. He swirled his brush around one in the, now murky green, water and rubbed his hands on his jeans. “What did you do?”

He moved to Jack’s side of the table and looked at the painting. His heart stopped for a moment, as his face broke into a grin that hurt his cheeks. “It’s beautiful,” he said, finding Jack’s eyes and staring into them.

“Bunch of trees,” he said, waving an embarrassed hand, but moving to stand next to David, anyway.

Riverdell, in all its beautiful colours, was unmistakable on the page.

“Did you seriously do this from memory?” David asked, still looking at the watercolour. It was almost perfectly in line with what he envies whenever he read the books.

“I mean, I might’ve read the books before a bit before so I remembered what it looked like.” Jack rubbed the back of his neck and gave David a bashful smile. “You’ve just been talking about it a lot recently. Thought I might try to paint it for you…”

David turned to him and kissed him on the check. “It’s perfect,” he murmured. It meant so much more when David remembered how much the Lord of the Rings agonised Jack. The number of times that David had forced him to watch it during the years they had been together was higher than it had any right to be.

Jack kissed David in return, brushing their lips lightly together, and wrapping his arms around David’s waist. The music continued to play in the background, and they swayed to it, slowly rocking from one foot to the next.

David leant his head against Jack’s. He could smell his aftershave, still clinging to his skin, and the inherent paint-like-scent that hung around him. It smelt like home.

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews from a Female Doctor, Season 3, p. 3

Please note: these reviews contain spoilers for multiple seasons of the reboot, and occasional references to events from the classic series.

Blink: This is an extraordinarily good story, possibly the best individual plotline of any Who episode. I wouldn’t consider it the best episode of all time, as some do, because the focus on single-episode characters prevents it from having the kind of emotional impact that we get in episodes centered on the Doctor and companion. Still, it’s a thrilling story about the sheer possibilities—both exhilarating and terrifying—that are attached to the presence of time travel. Like many of Moffat’s scripts, there is an extraordinarily large number of pieces to the story, but watching them fit together is never burdensome and is consistently delightful, thanks in part to the introduction of a captivating new monster. Most of the attention given to this episode has been devoted to the Angels themselves, who are indeed extraordinarily creepy villains. The quantum-locked statues are great in themselves, and even better in the effect that they have on other characters. Having to avoid blinking in order to ward off attack is a perfect horror-story rule, and the prospect of being suddenly sent back to a different time is convincingly terrifying. The gradual advancement of the Angels, who get closer and scarier every time someone looks away, is wonderfully directed—there’s something marvelously frightening about seeing their before and after pose but not seeing them actually move.

To me, though, the spookiest pieces of the episode don’t involve the Angels themselves but rather the fragments of writing and speech that help Sally to piece the plot together. The literal writing on the wall that opens the episode is fabulously creepy, and the DVD Easter eggs are even better. The Doctor’s efforts to bring about his own rescue through these Easter eggs, sparking lots of analysis in internet forums, is an appropriately nerdy premise for the show, and I love the bits of those forum discussions that we hear about from Larry. He’s a pretty underwritten character, but I can’t dislike anyone who puts “The Angels have the phone box” on a T-shirt. Sally’s initial “conversation” with the Doctor is already fascinating in terms of how the dialogue lines up, but when she watches it again, says different things, and the Doctor’s lines still work in response, it’s pretty mind-blowing, so lots of credit to Moffat for figuring out how to make that work. The whole concept of the Doctor reading from a transcript of a conversation that he’s still having is both a brilliant piece of plotting and an interesting opportunity to think about how free will fits into the idea of time travel. Sally is clearly making choices throughout the episode, and yet everything is unfolding according to the script that the Doctor put together based on Sally’s own notes—the time travel dimension pretty much makes sense of everything, but it’s still a tremendous shakeup of how we usually envision cause and effect.

The characters themselves generally work pretty well. Sally’s relationship with Larry is never convincingly developed—and, really, neither is Larry himself—but she’s a vibrant and engaging presence, aided by the abilities of a not-yet-famous Carey Mulligan. She has more than enough charisma to carry an episode that features very little David Tennant, and while she’s smart and capable, the script avoids making her into an implausibly good character. She’s fun and adventurous, but also a bit pretentious—particularly in her observation that sadness is “happiness for deep people”—and she has a sort of self-serving tendency to push other people into her dangerous adventures. It’s difficult to tell how much of the character’s charm stems from the writing, and how much is just Mulligan’s impeccable screen presence, but whatever the reason, Sally is one of the show’s most memorable single-episode characters. The Doctor makes the most of his small amount of screen time: “Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey” is rightfully one of the most famous lines of the reboot, and I also enjoy his flurried reference to the need to deal with “four things and a lizard.” I don’t like that even in an episode that has very little Doctor and even less Martha, we still have time for how uncomfortable their relationship is. He practically shoves her out of the shot when she tries to be in the video, and I don’t really understand why she is supporting him. (It’s the 1960s, she’s a black woman, he’s a white man. Even if he got the exact same job that she did, he would probably get paid twice as much. And yet, the implication is that she is working and he is not. Why?) Their relationship is pretty typical of what it is in much of the rest of the season, but it’s still annoying. Otherwise, though, the Doctor manages to be likeable and impressively memorable, in spite of the lack of screentime.

It’s hard to tell whether we should see this as a magnificent little island of an episode, or as an important harbinger of things to come. While it introduces monsters who will return in later seasons, it’s also a perfectly contained little narrative. However, it also feels like a statement of arrival, more so than either of Moffat’s previous episodes (even if I did like his Season One two-parter a bit better.) His contributions to Season One and (sort of) to Season Two showed him to be a strong writer, but this episode gives us a clearer sense of the kind of writer that he is. I don’t say this because it’s a fairly plot-driven episode, as I think the notion that Moffat made the show more plot-focused is almost completely unfounded, but the intricacy of this story is a good indication of just how much attention Moffat demands from his audience. We’ve still got plenty of the Davies era left to go, but this episode is an early indication that eventually, we’re going to get six full seasons in which a necessary component of understanding the further adventures of the Doctor and company is going to involve keeping your eyes wide open like your life depended on it. A

Utopia: The string of good episodes continues as the Doctor, Martha, and Jack find themselves at the end of the universe. It’s a terrifying place, and probably the most interesting non-Earth planet that Davies develops. The Futurekind are scary in themselves, but the dark world with barely anything left in it is even scarier. Even in this cold, bleak place, though, there is still hope for a better world, and we can see brief moments of warmth between the humans as they wait for Utopia. The emotional investment that this creates for these humans makes their eventual fate even sadder, and their doomed hopes for a new world are really beautifully portrayed here.

For the most part, Davies does an astonishing job of blending a thrilling plot with some lovely character work. The one downside to this episode is that it doesn’t always serve its female characters very well, especially since Jack’s curiosity about Rose means that this episode gives us an extra helping of Morose Martha. I’m not sure what’s more annoying: Jack’s assertion that the Doctor doesn’t abandon his blonde companions (Martha, annoyed: “Oh, she’s blonde!”) or the camera repeatedly cutting back to Martha looking bitter while The Doctor and Jack talk about what happened to Rose. It’s not that I blame Martha, who is responding reasonably to the Doctor’s behavior, but having more than one reference to the stupid Martha-vs.-Rose dynamic in a single episode is too much. Chantho is mostly used as an end-of-the-universe equivalent to Martha, as the script goes out of its way to point out that “Look! Professor Yana has a woman quietly pining away for him, just like the Doctor!” She and Martha then strike up a cute friendship, though, so the episode mostly emerges from the boring treatment of women that we get at the start.

Other than inadvertently heightening Martha’s resentment toward Rose, Jack makes a triumphant return here. (So does the Doctor’s severed hand, which Davies does a wonderful job of weaving into the plot of Tennant’s entire time on the show.) He’s just as charming and fun as he was in the first season, and we get a wonderful discussion between him and the Doctor regarding the Doctor’s abandonment of him after the defeat of the Daleks. It’s such a brief moment in “The Parting of Ways” that it would be easy to gloss over it, so I appreciate that the episode takes the time to describe Jack’s experience and to let him confront the Doctor about what he did. The Doctor’s excuse—that Jack is a fixed point in time, and therefore goes against the Doctor’s Time Lord gut instincts—is understandable, but not really sufficient to excuse the Doctor’s decision to just leave him behind. Jack isn’t particularly bitter here, though; he’s honest about what he’s gone through, but he’s still kindly disposed toward the Doctor and (of course) somewhat flirtatious toward him. Tennant and Barrowman have excellent chemistry, and the scene gracefully and effortlessly conveys their extremely complicated relationship.

The highlight of the episode, though, is Derek Jacobi’s portrayal of Professor Yana/The Master. I wish there was time for him to be in more than one episode, but he’s brilliant here, both as the kind, self-sacrificing professor and as the newly-aware Time Lord. His interactions with the Doctor and with Martha are marvelously done, and the growing awareness of his real identity is just superbly plotted. The drumming in his head is not always well-handled in future episodes, but Jacobi plays this element of his character with a great deal of sensitivity. The big reveal is an especially fabulous moment: the watch, the drumbeats, and the various other bits of the story slot together perfectly, and culminate in a terrific showdown between the Doctor and the new regeneration of the Master. Chantho’s scared but determined resistance gives us a great final moment for Jacobi’s Master, and Simm’s performance is an immediately enjoyable piece of ham. The final scene, in which the Master takes over the TARDIS, leaving the Doctor and company trapped at the end of the universe, is a stunning cliffhanger.

The episode’s conclusion is so excitingly plotted that it’s easy to miss some of the quieter, more philosophical work that Davies does with the Master here. We never quite get a clear sense of what the relationship is between a Time Lord’s actual personality and the human created by the watch; the Doctor tells Joan that he is capable of all that John Smith was, but there are also pretty clear differences between the two. The watch certainly does quite a lot of rewriting, but it doesn’t seem to create a completely new personality, which means that there are at least some similarities between Yana and the Master. It’s a fascinating thought, as until his memories return, Yana is kind and self-sacrificing. It’s a bit odd to me that Tennant doesn’t refer to this in the next episode, but for purposes of this episode, I like the subtlety with which Davies sets up the possibility that the Master might have quite a lot of goodness inside him. (This wouldn’t have been the intention at the time, but it also provides a nice bit of setup for the Twelfth Doctor’s later confidence that Missy can be redeemed.)

This episode sometimes gets overlooked a bit because of the flashier ones that preceded and follow it, but I really do think this is a sensational story. It’s fast-paced and scary, we get to explore an eerie new place, Jack Harkness is back, and the Master gets a great new incarnation. There are a couple of scenes that annoy me, but of the three parts of the season finale, I would say this one is my favorite. A/A-

The Sound of Drums: This episode is already starting to show how much Davies is straining to pull the plot arc together, but it’s such an exuberant episode that it’s easy to overlook the problems for now. A lot happens in this episode, which necessitates a certain amount of rushing; this is apparent from the opening scene, in which the previous episode’s cliffhanger (The Doctor, Martha, and Jack are trapped at the end of the universe without the TARDIS!!) is easily resolved by Jack having a time travel device that will transport all three of them. The Jones family would also have benefited from a bit more screentime here—what happens to them is shocking, but we aren’t given enough of the intriguing situation of Tish working for the Master, or of their reaction to their eventual capture. We really needed to get a clearer sense of how the Archangel Network functions, or possibly just a different sense, as I’m pretty sure it just changes completely between this episode and the next. When the story does invest sufficient time and detail into its narrative elements, though, it’s tremendously fun.

           Simm is charmingly evil here, and Davies’s script allows the Master to have a wonderful time taking over the world and messing with the Doctor’s mind. There are moments of extremely dark humor, such as his nonchalant murder of the entire cabinet with poisonous gas and his casual efforts to close the door on Vivien’s death screams. He has excellent chemistry with Tennant, particularly in the beautifully acted phone call, and it’s surprisingly delightful to see him watch The Teletubbies. He gets even more fun as he begins his strategy of cheerfully irritating the American president—a strategy that includes sitting down and pulling out some jelly babies. I love that in the midst of plotting world domination, he made the time to think “I’m going to bring the Doctor’s favorite snack to my glorious victory.” By the end of the episode, he is joyfully welcoming the Toclafane to the strains of “Voodoo Child,” and it’s just such an astonishing moment of silliness that it’s a perfect return for the Master. John Simm got stuck with some odd writing on this show, some of which shows up in the next episode and quite a lot of which appears in “The End of Time,” but this episode proves that when he is given good material, he’s an absolutely stellar Master. It helps that he has to spend much of the episode reining himself in just a little bit in order to plausibly function as prime minister, so that when he breaks into a much broader persona toward the end it really feels like a rise in energy and doesn’t seem like overkill. The constant drumbeat that he hears, which was approached with considerable nuance in the last episode, has turned into a cartoonish version of insanity; still, the episode makes no effort to pass this off as a realistic portrayal of mental illness, so it doesn’t really bother me. The scenery-chewing madness goes too far when he returns in “The End of Time,” but for this season, Simm does a good job of depicting an intentionally silly persona.

           Our main characters’ fugitive status lets them stay near the main action but also separate from it, which gives us lots of time to just watch them talk to each other and react to the situation. Their conversation about the Master is one of my favorite scenes of the whole season—the Doctor’s description of the treatment of Time Lord children is beautifully written and performed, and there is a wonderful sense of sympathy between the three characters here. The Doctor ends the scene by distributing perception filters, which I always love—there’s something about the ability to make yourself unseen without actually being invisible that I find absolutely thrilling every time it’s introduced on the show. Granted, the Doctor then goes a long way toward undoing the scene’s positive energy by explaining that perception filters are like fancying someone who doesn’t notice you, making me immensely aggravated that his thoughtlessness toward Martha is now being treated as a joke. Still, there’s a nice moment between Martha and Jack as they realize that they’re both in the same position in terms of their feelings toward the Doctor. Martha gets quite a lot of good material in this episode; I especially love that she gets to be in the driver’s seat for the car chase, and while I think her family is itself underwritten, her concern for them is portrayed very well.

           The Doctor’s relationship with the Master is the heart of the episode, and Tennant really sells his conflicted feelings of wanting to protect the world from the Master while also wanting to protect the one Time Lord he didn’t destroy. I don’t really understand the choice to avoid any mention of his own experiences as a human; the Doctor tries so hard, at first, to find a scrap of empathy in the Master that you would think “I went through the same experience of becoming human and forgetting my real identity for a while” would be a good approach. Nonetheless, his relationship with the Master is intriguing throughout the episode, and his determination to save the man who was once his friend seems incredibly heartfelt in spite of the Master’s over-the-top evil. I spend so much of the episode focusing on the Master and his interactions with the Doctor that the actual plot events fade a bit in comparison, but there are some good things here, especially the reveal that the Master has turned the TARDIS into a paradox machine. The Toclafane aren’t very interesting aliens until you find out who they are in the next episode, but they’re certainly a major threat and they give the Master an opportunity to really put on a show. The whole business with aging the Doctor doesn’t work very well and is an awfully random thing to do, but it’s the only real false note marring an otherwise sensational ending. The Toclafane have landed, the Master is dancing, and Martha is off to save the world on her own—not a bad cliffhanger to take us into the finale. A/A-

The Last of the Time Lords: I can get past plot holes. An episode full of them might not be my very favorite, but they don’t necessarily prevent me from enjoying the story. The worst kind of plot holes, though, are the kind that make the characters look idiotic, and we get an avalanche of those here. First, we have the Master, who comes across as so unbelievably stupid that I cease to see him as a meaningful antagonist. I get that he’s insane, and sort of a pantomime villain, but in the previous episode he at least looked like he had a sizeable streak of brilliance as well. In this episode, he’s got spies everywhere and a huge amount of leverage over people whose families he’s kidnapped, and yet he can’t manage to find out a plan at least some of which is known to most of the Earth’s population. Martha has spread the strategy of believing really hard in the Doctor during the countdown to what seems like millions, so the notion that the Master wouldn’t have caught on to this and would still be believing in the multi-colored gun plan just isn’t plausible. (I can sort of imagine him dismissing the plan, because he doesn’t believe in the power of human goodness in the way that the Doctor does, but I can’t imagine him just not figuring it out at all.)

           Martha herself comes across as incredibly courageous here, but the nature of the plan just doesn’t allow her to shine in the way that I want her to. I would actually have preferred it if the plot twist had been close to the reverse of what occurs at the end. If Martha had let the Master believe that she was going around spreading the Gospel of the Doctor like a good little companion as a cover to hide the fact that she was using her scientific knowledge to help turn the Archangel Network against him, that would have been amazing, and not really difficult to believe. As a medical student, she’s had practice in trying to figure out what’s wrong with other people. (Just ask the patient, said the snotty, ill-fated teacher in Martha’s first episode.) She knows how to figure out the use of complex machinery by quickly consulting the manual, as we also learned in that same episode. She has very precise knowledge of the human body, as we can see in her precise account of the bones of the hand in her conversation with Joan. I can imagine an episode in which Martha traveled the Earth, pretending to spread the news of the Doctor’s magnificence but also making observations and asking questions about how the Archangel Network made people feel, consulting the network’s manual, figuring out exactly how the mind control works and how it could be redirected, and using that to surprise the Master at the end of the episode. Then we wouldn’t have needed floaty Jesus Doctor, there would at least be sort of a reason for the Master being flummoxed, and the whole season of Martha being reduced to an unrequited love plot would at least have a great resolution; I would genuinely be less mad at scenes like the “Rose would know” moment in “The Shakespeare Code” if we were moving toward a finale in which Martha completely subverted the expectations created by her feelings for the Doctor. Instead, she just goes around talking about what a magical, wonderful, sparkly unicorn the Doctor is, omitting all of the darker elements of his nature and treating him like an absolutely perfect hero. It’s a nice continuation of the idea of the power of words, as set up in “The Shakespeare Code,” but it would be a lot more meaningful if there wasn’t a lingering sense that she’s using her words to hide elements of the Doctor as often as to reveal the truth about him.

           And then there is the Doctor himself. (I was really uncomfortable with the Doctor’s behavior in this episode, but was uncertain about why until I read the AV Club’s review, which makes a lot of the same points as what follows.) It’s bad enough that he spends much of the episode as Dobby the Elf/Gollum/whatever other fantasy creature you want to compare him to here. David Tennant’s odd, joyful presence is most of what makes this character work, so when he’s absent for much of the episode, it is sad. However, his return is constructed in such a way that it winds up being more aggravating than spending much of an episode without him. The Doctor has gone through an awfully dark period. He was in so angry and grief-stricken a place in the Christmas special after the loss of Rose that he killed off an entire species and would have accidentally drowned himself (as we learn next season) if Donna hadn’t stopped him. He was so infuriated at the end of “The Family of Blood” that he basically condemned four beings to eternal torment. He’s been so morose about Rose that he has mistreated Martha basically for the entirety of the season. He’s just had a couple of experiences that might be eye-opening to him: he’s had to hear about his abandonment of Jack Harkness from Jack’s perspective, and he’s gotten a reminder of the immense darkness in the one remaining Time Lord, one who was once his friend. He’s also seen the bleakness of the end of the universe, which might serve as a humbling reminder of his inability to actually fix everything. (The reveal that the Toclafane are humans is a pretty good moment of darkness, although the erasure of everything that they actually do in this episode does diminish this a bit.) The Doctor, until the Archangel Network nonsense happens, seems like someone who becoming aware of and at least starting to hold himself a little bit accountable for the problematic aspects of his behavior. There are a lot of ways to deal with this: there is something to be said for giving the Doctor a genuine crisis of conscience, and also something to be said for having him come to a partial realization of his own flaws and continuing to develop it more subtly over time. What you shouldn’t do, basically the one thing you definitely SHOULD NOT do in this scenario, is resolve your major seasonal arc by comparing this character to Jesus. Avoiding that should pretty much be your top priority. And yet, not only does the mass of strangers treat him like a Christ figure, he completely leans in to the comparison. His arms aren’t quite high enough to constitute an imitation of Jesus on the cross, but the position is close enough that the suggestion is there. When he starts floating around with his hands outstretched, looking like someone doing an almost-crucifixion pose on an invisible motorized scooter, smiling beatifically and extending his magnanimous forgiveness to the Master, it’s not just that it looks silly. (It does look silly, but the show’s made that work plenty of times.) It’s not even just that the Archangel Network, which appeared to be coded signals that used the four successive beats as a form of mind control in the previous episode, has now somehow become sentient enough to understand the words of people all over the world and to de-age him as a result; the Doctor claiming that he’s been attuning his mind to the network does nowhere near enough to make sense of this, but I could mostly overlook this if everything else was all right here. The main problem is that the Doctor has chosen to embrace his smug, morally superior side, at the expense of every bit of character development that has been in the works this season. He even suggests that humanity’s willingness to have absolute faith in him here, basically just on Martha’s word, is evidence of the greatness of our species, and I’m not sure that he’s ever had a more arrogant moment on this show.

           It’s not that I want everyone to turn on the Doctor and hate him for the few flaws that trouble a generally wonderful personality. Forgiveness and redemption are important elements of this show, but in order for them to be have the kind of impact that they should, there needs to be a sense that they are bestowed or achieved from a position of knowledge of what has gone wrong. The people who Tinkerbell him back to looking like David Tennant know very little of the Doctor’s problems—I certainly don’t get the sense that Martha is giving them the full version of his story. The Doctor has had a lot of time in this episode to reflect on his own failings, but he concludes that reflection here through being redeemed by the faith of people who believe in him because they’ve been given the sugarcoated version of his story, and it’s just such an empty conclusion to the work of the season that it’s an incredibly disappointing moment. Having the whole world express their belief in the Doctor as the embodiment of the ideals that he’s been failing to live up to all season could be an interesting moment if the Doctor was at least aware of the dissonance, but he seems to buy into his own myth so thoroughly that the episode essentially erases everything the season has done to complicate his character. There are plenty of moments in this reboot in which the Doctor behaves in problematic ways, but usually these are individual moments, and he redeems himself fairly quickly afterward. There are, therefore, plenty of times when I don’t like what the Doctor is doing, but I generally still really like him as a character. This is the one moment in which I sort of question where I stand toward the character as a whole; he just seems so utterly oblivious of his own flaws and so self-indulgent that I’m not sure about whether he’s a character I can admire.

           He does win me back quite quickly, as Tennant does a beautiful job of portraying the Doctor’s grief over the death of the Master. Lucy Saxon’s murder of her husband would be a better moment if the episode hadn’t done so much to telegraph that something was going to go wrong with her; her behavior early in the episode shows her to be just barely holding herself back from snapping, so it’s not much of a surprise when it happens. Otherwise, though, the death and funeral pyre of the Master are sublimely done, and I’m so sad for the Doctor as he cradles his dying rival that I can almost forget how annoying he has been in this episode. I do wish that he had saved a little bit of that grief for his separation from Martha, which he accepts with irritating equanimity. It’s a fantastic moment for her, as she decides to walk out for her own emotional health, and actually gets to leave the TARDIS on her own terms instead of the usual story of being forced out by disaster. Given that the Doctor nearly lost his mind after being separated from Rose and even Joan, it’s a little sad that he doesn’t have a bit more of a reaction to the departure of a woman who has just spent a year (an erased year, but a year nonetheless) traveling the Earth to help him. It’s still a good scene for her, and, in general, the episode’s last few minutes work much better than the nonsense that preceded them. Even with some really good moments, though, an episode in which the Master looks like an absolute moron, Martha saves the world but in a dull, clichéd fashion, and the Doctor loses all sense of perspective is not a satisfying end to the season. C+/C