TV episode review
UK airdate 30 June 2007 (BBC1)

A year has passed since the events of the last episode, and the Master still reigns supreme. With the Doctor and Jack out of action and a new Time Lord empire on the rise, can the itinerant Martha save the day?

It's been a funny old series of Doctor Who. We've seen some of the best episodes of the show since its 2005 return (Human Nature, Utopia, Blink), and some of the worst (Gridlock, the Dalek two-parter). The tone has been wildly inconsistent, often within the space of single episodes, but when it has been at its best, it has been unsurpassable.

But what to make of Last of the Time Lords, a curate's egg so scrambled it's hard to know where to begin? At once wildly cartoonish and unremittingly dark, it crammed an awful lot of something into its extended running time, but it was hard to tell how much of it meant anything at all.

Why did the Master need to become Prime Minister to carry out his plans? Why did the Doctor's rejuvenation signal the Master's defeat? What was the signal calling the last humans to Utopia? Why did they regress into those things? Why does no one care? Did the Master sacrifice himself at the end simply because it was nearly time for Confidential on BBC3?

If these were just fanboy quibbles, it would be easy to put them aside. But they're not. They're integral to Last of the Time Lords actually making any kind of narrative sense. Without answers, it's still an exhilarating spectacle, but an utterly empty one, where it doesn't matter how or why things happen, so long as it all looks good. In other words, it's a cheat.

But the biggest cheat of all is of course the hitting of the reset button that has now featured in two out of three season finales (last time in The Parting of the Ways). The classic series never needed to rely on such get-out clauses, because it was always at its most powerful when the threat to humanity was represented by the struggles of a small group of characters, as befitted its limited budget. If that group should fall, then we knew the rest of the world would follow.

Nowadays, the scope and the temptation to depict all-consuming Armageddon is far greater, but the show is still at its best when depicting more claustrophobic, character-led confrontations (cf The Family of Blood). When wiping out entire swathes of the population becomes a mere throwaway line, it ceases to have any of the power that might justify its inclusion, and simply becomes depressing, as much of this episode is.

From putting Martha's family through a year of hell, to turning the Doctor into a helpless and scary-looking Gollum, it was a relentlessly bleak end to the series, despite the frenetic tone of much of the action. Even when everything is resolved, the key players remember everything that's gone on, and humanity remains destined to become just another race of Daleks, it seems, albeit far in the distant future.

As for the Doctor, he spends most of the episode doing nothing at all, until his uncomfortably messianic resurrection, and shows no compassion for the suffering of Martha's family, nor gratitude towards Martha for saving him (and everyone else). When Martha leaves, you can't help but think that her mum was right, because, if Martha had never met the Doctor, her family's lives would not now be in ruins.

As ever, the cast are on great form, and the dialogue is typically top notch. The episode flies by, but leaves an ultimately unsatisfying feeling in its wake. It's a disappointing downer to end an up-and-down year. Here's hoping that next year's finale doesn't confuse disaster with drama and spectacle with story in the same way. Paul Collins

VERDICT: 5/10