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Doctor Who - Utopia / Doctor Who - The Sound of Drums / Doctor Who - Last of the Time Lords
episodes 3.11, 3.12, 3.13
UK 2007
produced by Phil Collinson, Russell T.Davies (executive), Julie Gardner (executive) for BBC Wales/BBC
directed by Graeme Harper, Colin Teague
starring David Tennant, Freema Agyeman, John Barrowman, John Simm, Derek Jacobi, Chipo Chung, Adjoa Andoh, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Trevor Laird, Reggie Yates, Alexandra Moen, Tom Ellis, Ellie Haddington, Colin Stinton, Nichola McAuliffe, Nicholas Gecks, Sharon Osbourne, McFly, Ann Widdecombe, Olivia Hill, Lachele Carl, Daniel Ming, Elize du Toit, Tom Golding, Natasha Alexander, René Zagger, Neil Reidman, Paul Marc Davis, Robert Forknall, John Bell, Deborah MacLaren, Abigail Canton
written by Russell T.Davies, music by Murray Gold
TV-series Doctor Who, Doctor Who (David Tennant), Doctor Who (new series), Martha Jones, The Master, The Master (John Simm), Captain Jack
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
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Captain Jack (John Barrowman) is back, and as a hello, he sends Doctor
Who's (David Tennant) time and spacemachine TARDIS a few trillion years
into the future, right to the end of the universe, where the Doctor, Cap
Jack and the Doctor's companion Martha (Freema Agyeman) stumble upon the
last humans who are threatened by your typical mutants and who want to go
to Utopia by a spaceship the ingenious Professor Yana (Derek Jacobi) is
building - but apparently it needs the help of the Doctor to really launch
the rocket into space.
Thing is, Professor Yana isn't really Professor Yana but the Doctor's
arch-enemy the Master in human disguise, and once he gets rid of the
disguise (and turns out to be John Simm), he steals the Doctor's TARDIS
and goes back to present day London ...
Fortunately, Captain Jack has a timetravel device himself, so he, the
Doctor and Martha go after the Master - only to find out he has since
become Prime Minister of the UK, using some sort of mass hypnosis
transmitted via cellular phones. But his plans are far bigger, he has the
earth overrun by flying spheres that kill or enslave most of humanity and
that eventually turn out to be the humans from trillion years into the
future - which would be a paradox (humans killing their own ancestors)
which is why the Master needed the Doctor's TARDIS to build a
paradox-machine. The Doctor and company want to stop the obvious madman,
who plans to eventually conquer the universe from earth as his homebase,
but the Master manages to age the Doctor into some sort of methusalem and
apprehend and chain up Captain Jack, only Martha escapes - and from now on
she's the resistance's only hope, because only she knows how to get rid of
the Master.
And how does she ?
She uses the Master's own device, the cellular phone net against him by
feeding it with information about the Doctor and makes sure that everybody
thinks about the Doctor at exactly the same time and boom, the Doctor
becomes young again and he and his friends ultimately manage to overthrow
the Master, who is ultimately even killed by his own wife (Alexandra
Moen), who up until now was the Master's closest ally in all his evil
deeds ...
With that accomplished, the Doctor dismantles the paradox machine,
turning everything back to like it was before the spheres started
conquering the earth.
In your usual sappy ending, Martha bids farewell to the Doctor.
A less than convincing season finale that not only recycles large
chunks from season 1's season finale (click
here) but also has a story that seems to be all over the place but
has nowhere particular to go. And the reappearance of Captain Jack (of Torchwood
fame) does not really make too much sense in the narrative context of
the episode either, nor the revelation that he is actually immortal. The
main failure of the triple episode though is that it piles one interesting
context upon the other and never really takes time to explore any of them,
which leaves them stale and uninteresting - and thus the end of the
universe, mass hypnosis via the cellphone net, the paradox machine,
spheres conquering the earth, an immortal character and the overcoming of
an enemy by human thought rather than weapons, interesting as all of this
sounds, amount to very little. An esoteric and unconvincing finale of
course doesn't help much either ...
A disappointment.
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