The Doctor Who finale. The end of David Tennant as the Doctor. A choice: to kill or let the Earth be destroyed. A choice that he must make with a gun and a bullet.
OK, so guns, something that the Doctor does not use and murder. Must be a really good and juicy ending to the story arc. Oh, wait he shoots a machine. Really, he was given an A or B question and he chose C? RTD is just fucking with us at this point right?
Now, to put this into perspective, let’s look at a good use of a gun as a plot device.
Full Metal Jacket. If you have seen it: congratulations, you have seen a great movie. If you haven’t: get your ass down to the video store and get a copy.
So the movie starts out with a group of recruits being trained to go to Vietnam. Their Gunnery Seargent uses mockery and verbal abuse to harden the recruits into fighting machines as he feels it is his job to product warriors to go fight overseas.
I mean just look at this guy. The recruits are in their underwear and this maniac is screaming at them because of some petty shit he finds to be an insult to the American way of life. That’s a scary dude and on top of that he’s trained to kill.
So he picks on this one guy, Pvt. Pyle who is overweight and probably borderline mentally retarded. He makes this guy’s life miserable. The rest of the platoon at one point haze Pyle and beat the shit out of him with bars of soap wrapped in towels.
After that, Pyle seems to improve, but he’s actually gone crazy and ends up going apeshit and killing the Gunnery Seargent before blowing his own brains out.
Now why did I mention all of that. Throughout the training, the recruits have the importance of their rifle drilled into their heads. When Pyle goes crazy, he starts talking to his gun. He then uses the gun to kill the Seargent and then himself.
The gun is used as a plot device as it it’s usage defines the recruits as soldiers (that’s how they kill the enemy) and then is used by Pyle to kill the Seargent and himself. OK, so that makes sense as you kind of see it coming and when the murder happens, it is a satisfying end to the story arc. The reaction follows the action of training as Pyle had become desensitized to killing.
On the other hand, the shit that we get in The End of Time is not logical. The Doctor is told that he must kill to sever the link. It is almost like the woman in white and Wilf are training him to kill. You would think that he would shoot The Master or Rassillon or maybe he is another part of the link, so maybe he kills himself. Shooting the machine doesn’t make sense. We are told that The Master is the link, the other side is Rassillon. Having The Doctor be the bridge I could buy since he ended the time war, but the machine had no part in the Time War.
My advice to RTD: “Stop writing crappy endings, if you can’t come up with an ending for an arc yourself, just steal one from someone who could. Your fans won’t be upset, heck you can even make it a nod to a fellow filmmaker and people will respect you for it.”
The old series was great because there were consequences for The Doctor’s actions. Perry never made it back to Earth, The Doctor could have stopped the Daleks from existing but failed. He changed the course of events on planets, but that hardly happens anymore. RTD teased us about killing Rose, but then he didn’t kill her. He teased us about a companion dying but then no one died. Hell, even David Tennant’s own death sequence turned into a frigging walk down memory lane.
I just hope that the next season brings some better stories. Otherwise Dr Who is turning into another Heroes, but worse. Even Heroes kills off some of its characters in order to show that a plot exists.
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