Doomsday

This was a pretty good episode. The problem is that last week's episode demanded a follow-up that was great, even epic; and while Doomsday tried, it wasn't able to make it. (I found it ironic watching the accompanying Confidential after writing this bit, and hearing the production staff use the same word - epic - without managing to achieve it.)

So... Daleks vs. Cybermen, with Earth caught in the crossfire. Given that the Cybermen could barely slow down four Daleks, this shouldn't be much of a battle. (Which is about what I figured; these Daleks have been portrayed as nigh-unstoppable death machines with probably centuries of refinement, while these Cybermen are the first-generation products of a near mirror of present-day Earth. Unless the Daleks have an unexpected weakness or the Cybermen an unexpected strength, it's not much of a contest.) Only somehow, it works. Despite Cybermen getting mown down left and right as the Daleks press through to get out of the Torchwood building, despite the gratuitous appearance of enough Daleks to burn the planet down to bedrock, there's still a scope and frisson there as hordes of Daleks swoop down out of the sky to attack massed formations of Cybermen. Give the production team credit for taking something that should have been a blowout and making it involving.

Torchwood itself turned out to be surprisingly insignificant after last week's buildup. It provided a setting for the main story events. It provided a bunch of camo-uniformed extras to fire ineffectively in the battle in the warehouse. And that's about it, really. Yvonne gets verbally slapped by Jackie for bringing the deluge, but no further reflection on Torchwood's role in the matter. Dr. Singh gets a moment of heroic sacrifice. And Yvonne gets a redemptive moment that feels utterly right even if it's not terribly logical. But no one from Torchwood tries to grab any of the hi-tech equipment they've hoarded over the years and fight back on something resembling equal terms. No one steps forward to help (or hinder) the Doctor and his friends, who run around the building as if they own the place. I'd expected Torchwood to play a bigger part than 'toybox for the Doctor,' really.

The Genesis Ark was another disappointment. This is the last legacy of Gallifrey, the only thing remaining of the Time Lords besides the Doctor himself and his TARDIS - and all it does is spit out a horde of Daleks? I'd hoped for something more uniquely Gallifreyan, myself; something on the level of the Hand of Omega, maybe, something that would have added real weight to the use of the Time Lords as the source. ('It's bigger on the inside'? Come on, RTD, you can do better than that.) A mysterious, powerful artifact from the depths of history, used in a creative and awe-inspiring way? That's epic. A mysterious and powerful artifact turned into a plot device for producing Daleks? That's a let-down. We've already seen a Dalek army pulled out of a hat once in a season finale, and the impact was a lot smaller the second time around. There's no sensawonder here; or rather, it was strangled the moment the Daleks started flying out.

A powerful, ancient Gallifreyan artifact could also have been used to add some much-needed epic to the story's resolution. I mean, come on; 'void energy' that tags all the inter-universal travellers so that they get sucked back in when the Doctor opens the breach? Pop, and the problem's gone, no-muss-no-fuss and really easy cleanup? (Well, all right, there's the casualties and battle damage in London...) It's too simple. It's too convenient. It's too *easy*, and this is the single biggest flaw in the main plot. What's 'epic' about the Doctor pulling the stopper and having all the bad guys spiral down the drain, with no further effort on his part? The characters really needed to work for the ending to give it epic magnitude, and clinging to a bar over the Void doesn't count; that scene would make a good capper to an episode of work setting up the ending, but there was no real setup for it to cap. (Unless you count the Doctor's gurning around with the glasses for two episodes; since that could have been anything, I don't. Real foreshadowing should tell us something about what's going to happen, and the glasses didn't tell us anything.)

Ignoring the literary merit of the resolution for a moment, it also has large gaping plot holes. The whole purpose of a void ship was to shield the occupants from the effects of the Void; so why, then, were the Daleks tainted with void energy? If the void energy caused the Cybermen to be sucked in when the breach was opened at Torchwood, how were they able to march out of the breach into Torchwood in the first place? And if the Void's pull was strong enough to yank Rose away from her handhold, how in the heck did Pete avoid getting pulled in when he appeared, much closer to the breach than she was? I'm sorry, but this just reeks of a cheap gimmick the writers pulled out of a hat - to magically get rid of the Daleks and Cybermen, not to mention set up a massive dramatic scene - without taking the time to think it through.

Imagine if the Genesis Ark had revealed something that the Doctor had to try and take back from the Daleks, instead of just dumping out enough Daleks to raise the threat to 'deus-ex-machina required' levels. Imagine if Torchwood personnel had stepped forward and helped in the fight, because they've trained with the hi-tech equipment and can do something useful instead of firing ineffective guns at nigh-invulnerable enemies. Imagine if there was a solution to the situation that required the Doctor to put in more than a couple minutes of 'open the Barrier, boom they all go away'? (Even the delta wave in last season's finale, which never got used, required more work and more thinking about the consequences than this did.) Extra points if this solution involved whatever came out of the Genesis Ark, so that more parts of the plotline tie together. Any of these would have made for a more involved, and thus for me more entertaining, story than what we actually got - which was fun but shallow.

Then there's the Jackie 'n Pete show. By the end of Age of Steel, I really respected Pete Tyler; coming across as a weak opportunist at the start, then turning out to be using that as a cover for gathering intelligence, and finally having the wisdom at the end to realize that Rose's clutching after a lost father wasn't leading anywhere good or healthy - and closing the conversation off when Rose pushed things too far. So I was impressed - though not particularly surprised - to see him show up as an authority figure in the alt-universe. Unfortunately, that led to The Reunion that had been telegraphed in letters of fire at 150+ dB. If the 'void energy' magical resolution was poorly set up and foreshadowed, this went to the opposite extreme, with the idea pounded in with a sledgehammer. I suppose it's another complement to the actors and the production staff that it turned out to be an 'awwwww' moment after all, and made me feel good about it despite my annoyance at how blatently it was set up. I just wish it hadn't been so pat; that it hadn't felt so deliberately manufactured.

And so we come to the part that's probably going to get the most argument - the departure of Rose Tyler.

Just to be clear where I stand: I thought she was a good companion, had some classic moments, but the attempt to set her up as 'the Bestest Companion EVAR' (to quote a friend) didn't just fall flat for me, it grated. The Doctor has had many companions over the years. There's been a few he's formed a special bond with - Jo Grant. Romana II. Sarah Jane. Ace. But they were never given the 'always and forever' tagline, repeated ad nauseam like an infatuated teenager with a crush. One of the best lines of School Reunion was the Doctor's 'I have to go on' - and that holds true for the Doctor and the show. So especially in Rose's later appearances, I alternated between cheering for her moxie in rallying the station crew in Satan Pit, or applauding her for putting together the pieces on Magpie's television operation before the Doctor manages to (only to get trapped because she wasn't ready to handle the situation, drat) - and groaning at cutsey-cute moments where she and the Doctor act like they've stepped out of a John Hughes high school comedy from the 80's. I was, frankly, relieved to see her go while I still liked her, before she wore out her welcome any further. All I hoped for is that she would get a good exit...

...which Doomsday *wasn't*. I give credit to RTD for trying to subvert expectations about Rose dying. But when you open an episode with a character going 'This is how I died,' you'd better darn well have a good payoff to justify it. This didn't qualify. The idea of a metaphoric 'death' can be powerful when used right; but it takes a delicate, sure touch to avoid becoming faux-Romantic teenage-angsty melodrama. Did this example work for me? Sorry, no. (One example that did work for me was The Princess Bride, because it was handled with a light touch, and the actual 'I died that day.' line was almost tossed off and not unduly stressed.) Did she lose everything that made life meaningful to her? Judging the family attachment by how hard she tried to save her alt-parents in Age of Steel, and how much losing Mickey seemed to hurt her at the end of that episode, I'd hardly think so - and so likening her loss of the Doctor to Death came across to me as an artificial and overblown attempt to raise the stakes on the ending. It's a cheap, lazy form of emotional manipulation, and it really put me off.

Looking back, it's almost surprising how much I did enjoy the episode. I think the key was a lot of nice moments that had little impact on the overarching plot. The Doctor's angry speech to the Cyber Leader - "You're in their homes, you've got their *children.* Of course they're gonna fight!" The shot of the family huddled in terror as the Cyber Leader spoke - "Do not fear. Cybermen will remove fear." The Cybermen and the Daleks talking smack at each other: "Daleks have no concept of el-e-gance." "This is obvious." Mickey's growth, and his vastly increased comfort with the Doctor. ("So he's sending the Daleks and the Cybermen straight to hell. Man, I told you he was good.") The problem is that these moments are like cotton candy; tastes good for a moment, but doesn't last and too much of it without a solid meal underneath doesn't sit well. What it feels like is the writer had these moments in mind combined with a couple of big story events (in particular the hanging-over-the-void scene), and then tried to come up with plot devices to make them happen. ("Hey, I want to see an army of Daleks fighting the army of Cybermen, but where am I going to get one? I know, I'll make a Time Lord artifact that's a prison ship...") The problem is that when you come up with these ideas solely as plot devices, and don't take the time to develop them into part of a real story framework, what you get is flimsy storytelling.

I think the key phrase for this episode, for me, is 'entertaining in spite of itself.' In the end, it was still fun to watch, but there were too many points where the plot took very sloppy shortcuts to get a particular scene or a particular resolution, and only some top-notch work in the actual direction/production/performance was able to save the moment. (Which is probably why the epilogue failed for me; the performance wasn't able to carry off a plot/character moment that I disagreed with.) That's why the episode was also ultimately disappointing; if the same talent had been applied to ideas and plot points that had some thought and depth to them, this could have been a truly great episode. As it is, it couldn't live up to the promise of the prior episode, and that's a shame.