The Sainted Physician: The Doctor Faces His Greatest Threat on "Doctor Who: The End of Time (Part One)"

Time itself has caught up with the Doctor.

The latest Doctor Who Christmas special, Doctor Who: The End of Time (Part One), found the Doctor attempting to fight his fated death... or at least the prophesied end of this incarnation of the solitary Time Lord.

But it's not just the prophecy of the end of the Doctor's song ("he will knock four times") that provides the focus of this, the penultimate Doctor Who episode starring David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor. It was an installment that featured the return of several familiar faces, including John Simm's The Master (reborn in a matter of speaking), Bernard Cribbins' Wilfred, and Catherine Tate's Donna Noble. Along with the alien Ood, who telepathically tap into a global nightmare pattern involving the Master and alert the Doctor to impending doom in the form of the titular end of time.

Written by Russell T. Davies and directed by Euros Lyn, Doctor Who: The End of Time (Part One) finds the Doctor in the midst of an existential crisis. Still reeling from the disastrous choice he made in Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars, the Doctor finds himself at his lowest point, unaccompanied and alone, and must face his mortal enemy... as well as the possible end of his adopted people, the human race.

The scene between the Doctor and Wilf (Cribbins) in the cafe--an exercise arranged by Wilf so that the Doctor would see Donna and hopefully cure her--was absolutely heartbreaking, as the Doctor tearfully confronted his fallibility and his mortality. It was a scene masterfully played by Tennant, who not only embodied the Doctor's own fears but also our own sadness at the inevitable end of this incarnation. Has he made the right choices? The wrong ones? Is he to blame for what's about to happen? Is his eternal loneliness penance for the mistakes he's made, the friends he's lost? For the fire and the floods? The ice and the destruction?

But the Doctor isn't quite alone: he has a companion of sorts in Wilf, the grandfather of his former traveling companion Donna Noble (Tate). The Doctor and Wilf are united by a bond of deception--both, after all, conspired to lie to Donna in order to save her life, erasing all traces of the Doctor from her memory--and by something else, something that keeps them crossing paths. The Doctor refers to Wilf as existing "at the heart of coincidence," but there are signs that someone--or something--is deliberately pulling their strings.

After all, we still don't know the identity of the mystery woman (Claire Bloom) whom Wilf meets in that church, the one that depicts the "blue box" of the "sainted physician" in its stained glass window. She's the same woman who appears on his television set during the Queen's speech and who urges him to help the Doctor, saying that he can still be saved if Wilf bears arms once more and doesn't reveal the contents of this message to the Doctor himself. But is this mystery woman helping or hindering their cause? And just who is she really?

Her presence in the story is one of many mysteries in Doctor Who: The End of Time (Part One), which sets up a final confrontation between the Doctor and his nemesis, the mad Time Lord known as The Master, seemingly resurrected from death with some newfound powers... and a new blonde hairdo.

It's that hairstyle that's odd, really. I can't help but wonder where the blonde hair came from and if it has anything to do with the presence of Lucy Saxon (Alexandra Moen) at the Master's rebirth. Lucy is after all blonde... and we don't know just what she threw at the Master's visage during the resurrection process, an action that resulted in the death of several willing sacrificial victims (all loyal to Harold Saxon's anarchist cause). But where did Lucy go? Has she somehow fused with The Master himself? And just what are the source of his strange powers, which seemingly grant him the ability to absorb human life, fire electrical blasts, and soar into the sky?

Personally, I think the Master is terrifying enough without the additional abilities, which lend his character an air of over-the-top comic book supervillainy. The intimacy of the sequence where the Doctor forms a telepathic link with the Master and shockingly learns that the drum beats aren't in fact part of the Master's madness but something else, something real, was electric enough without having the former prime minister blasting away at his foe with blue electricity. Tennant and Simm are both fantastically dynamic actors and the scenes where the two face off with chess-like precision have more subtle power within them.

As Davies told me a few months back, it wasn't Lucy who reached into the Master's funereal pyre and pulled out his signet ring, but the new governor of the prison where Lucy Saxon is being held. The member of a secret cabal of Saxon loyalists, she uses the ring along with Lucy's biometric imprint to bring the Master back to life, at the cost of her own.

And there's another organization that wants The Master for themselves, a group overseen by father and daughter futurists Joshua Naismith (David Harewood) and
Abigail Naismith (Tracy Ifeachor) that has unwittingly constructed an Immortality Gate. Joshua intends to use the Gate to give his daughter neverending life but it's a gift that's twisted by the Master for his own insane purposes: the creation of a Master race, the rewriting of the human genetic code to create a literal race of Master clones.

Yet hope remains. Not everyone is affected by the genetic wave: both Wilf (ensconced in nuclear shielding nearby the Gate) and Donna (saved thanks to the metacrisis at the end of Season Four) remain themselves. But Donna's salvation triggers a flood of memories, which threaten to burn her up from the inside. We're left not knowing whether Donna will live or die (I'm leaning towards the former) but I have a feeling that the Master's final trick has unexpectedly saved her life and her memories.

But the true threat to the universe doesn't come from the Master's, er, masterstroke of villainy. Instead, it's the end of Time, a threat manifested in the return of the Time Lords themselves, numbering in the thousands. Just how have they survived the Time War? Where are they and Gallifrey? And why does the Lord President of the Time Lords (Timothy Dalton), who serves as the installment's narrator, seem so hell-bent on conflict? And are the drums the Master has heard his whole life the drums of a Gallifreyan war? We'll have to wait until the end of the week to find out.

All in all, Doctor Who: The End of Time (Part One) offered a fantastic prelude to David Tennant and Russell T. Davies' final act ahead. The penultimate Doctor Who special brought up some of Doctor Who's enduring subplots and set up a monumental showdown involving the Master and Time itself, as well as some of the revival series' narrative foundations themselves (given the destruction of Gallifrey and the Doctor's status as the last Time Lord).

Just how Time will be put to right again remains to be seen, but I am nervous about Wilf's wartime pistol, the mystery woman's warnings, and the deathly prophecy itself. Not to mention that this weekend's conclusion to Doctor Who: The End of Time will signal the end for the Tenth Doctor himself. Lives will be lost, sacrifices made, and the laws of the universe itself ripped apart... and I am sure I'll be moved to tears by the death of the Tenth Doctor and his regeneration.

This is one man, after all, who won't be going gently into that good night. Not without a fight, anyway.

Doctor Who: The End of Time (Part Two) airs Saturday evening at 8:30 pm ET/PT on BBC America.