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| "I am the Master, and these...I pulled right out of my ass." |
Well, maybe someday, they'll make that resolution, because this is the Russell T. Davies era. It's this era of the show where drama exists only when it's convenient and then tossed on shelf whenever the writer doesn't care about it anymore.
Until he does again.
The trio do indeed make it back to 2007 using Jack's vortex manipulator. That's it. The Doctor sonics it and they escape. La de da! Arriving back in England, they find that Election Day already happened and the oft-mentioned Harold Saxon is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Or, rather, the Master is. Martha recognizes him and the Doctor does too, for what he is.
The Master was apparently elected almost unanimously. It was 2007, so the thought that someone who is so very obviously an evil psychopath could become an almost universally beloved political figure was a notion that seemed hilarious. Now, it's just...agonizingly quaint or maddeningly hilarious depending on what side of the political spectrum you fall.
...I think I'm gonna need more rum, this is getting too real.
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| "100 trillion years upright, I need a sit." |
Meanwhile, the Master schmoozes with the people, including his new assistant that definitely hasn't accepted a job right into a trap Tish Jones, and decides to gas his entire cabinet for being a bunch of traitors. After all, if there's one thing that the Master appreciates, it's loyalty.
That's why he turned his back on Time Lord society.
Then tried to take over the Earth with the help of the Nestene Consciousness...and tried to start World War III by manipulating the Earth's governments against each other...and summoned daemons to overrun Earth...and betrayed the Doctor at Pharos Project while they were trying to save the universe...kidnapped the flight crews of several passenger jets to repair his TARDIS while trapped on an alien world...and manipulated a Chinese-American street thug to try and steal the Doctor's body.
...I could go on. The point is, the Master does this for no other reason than to show us that he's totally evil. This actually works to the episode's determent as it makes the Doctor's efforts to capture and rehabilitate him look like the Doctor's a hypocritical jackass.
Anyway, the Master has apparently taken the United Kingdom by storm. He also has a wife, Lucy Saxon. We'll get into her later.
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| He gives this episode two big thumbs up. I do not. |
The Doctor, Jack, and Martha get back to the latter's flat. The Doctor and Jack go into research mode on Harold Saxon.
Back at Downing Street, a woman named Vivian Rook manages to fast talk her way into meeting with Lucy. She reveals that she knows much more than she lets on, that Harold Saxon did not exist before eighteen months ago. In a twist, however, Lucy knows all about it and is fully onboard with the Master's plan...and the Master reveals himself as having been listening the whole time.
How exactly he was hiding when he is revealed to be standing in the exact spot that Vivian Rook was looking is a mystery that goes unsolved, though one could chalk it up to the Master being a (pardon the term) master hypnotist. He introduces himself as the Master and summons up a quartet of sentient spheres that he calls his friends, and they kill Vivian in a way far too gruesome to be shown onscreen.
Lucy expresses some worry about Vivian having been able to see the truth about him, but the Master assures her that everything will fall into place the following morning. I doubt that she'll be told about him killing off his entire cabinet, since I imagine that would give her a heart attack.
There is a bit, before the reveal, where Lucy hesitates, which I'll get into more when we get around to Last of the Time Lords and later The End of Time.
Also, the Master mentions the drumming, following on from last episode. We'll be getting back to that here.
Also also, the rooms in Downing Street are apparently soundproofed so long as you close the door.
Sure.
Back at the flat, the Doctor and company have dug up the same information that Vivian Rook did and Martha and Jack both reveal they were going to vote for Saxon before. When asked about his platform and the things he stood for, Martha can't say...but her fingers rhythmically tap against her hand. A rhythm of four.
The Master takes to television to address the nation. He utilizes stock footage from various previous episodes and then announces the arrival of a new alien race - the Toclafane. The Doctor rejects this as nonsense, but then the Master reveals himself...and his mention of medical students gets the Doctor to turn the TV around, revealing dynamite straight out of a Looney Tunes short.
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| Not even the Master could win a staring contest with the Time Vortex |
There are so many reasons why this is baffling. I'm not questioning how he knows where she lives because I could see him conceivably finding out, so that doesn't bother me. My only real question for this is: why? The Master took all this time and energy to plant a bomb in Martha's flat and didn't just...blow it up? Was it motion activated or keyed to that specific speech? The bomb doesn't start to go off until the Doctor turns the TV around.
On that note, how did the Doctor know there was anything wrong with the television or have any inclination to turn it around immediately? The dynamite pack isn't exactly subtle, sure, but it's not as if it was remotely visible from the back. I'm not sure if it was scripted this way or if it was a lack of communication between Russell, the director, and the production design team, but it's just utterly baffling.
Martha calls up her mother, despite the Doctor's protests, and Francine and Clive are watched by the mysterious woman from 42 until Clive encourages Martha to run in spite of the imminent danger. Martha starts off in the car after them, the Doctor and Jack coming along, as they see both Francine and Clive being dragged into a police van.
Tish, likewise, gets dragged away in Downing Street.
Saxon's soldiers take out the back of Martha's car as the trio manage to escape. Jack tells her they need to ditch the car, which they do. Martha makes a last-ditch effort to contact her brother, Leo, and managing to get a hold of him. She tells him to run and hide, but the Master is already listening in on the call. The Doctor takes the phone, and he and the Master have their first conversation in 100 trillion years.
Oh, and this has nothing to do with anything, but this is the last time we see Martha's brother Leo. Ever. No doubt he is having tea and crumpets now with Chuck Cunningham and Judy Winslow in the Realm of Forgotten TV Characters.
As for the conversation, The Doctor lays out what happened to Gallifrey and encourages the Master to give up his schemes and come with him. All they have is each other now. They are the last of the Time Lords.
We also learn that the Toclafane are a Gallifreyan fairy tale. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that they were also Russell's original idea for the Time Lords' opponents in the Time War if the series couldn't get the rights back for the Daleks from the Terry Nation estate. Not that that factors into their origins in the actual show, as we'll see.
The Master lays out that he ran because he was scared, using the Chameleon Arch to become human and hiding out at the end of the universe. He tells the Doctor that it's too late, the drums are getting louder. The Doctor tries to talk him down, and the Master reveals that he and his companions have become Public Enemies 1, 2, and 3 as is seen on television.
Also, the Torchwood team won't be showing up to help Jack because the budget doesn't stretch that far...I mean, the Master's sent them off on a wild goose chase. Yeah, that's it.
So, the Doctor, Jack, and Martha go on the run as the news outlets across the Earth talk about the upcoming alien meeting and the Master watches Teletubbies because reference joke.
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| "Mister Master, you have misunderestimated my bravery!" |
Alas, again, the budget doesn't stretch that far but the Doctor doesn't even go so far as to mention them. Although, with that scene of Martha's family getting arrested, I can only imagine the Master went out of his way to detain them, possibly out of spite. Though the fact that they're not all dead is rather astounding and even if they were, given the nature of this two-parter, it probably would have been undone anyway.
Instead, the three end up in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere getting black market chips and trying to form a plan. The Doctor talks about the Master (who the Doctor dismisses any notion of him being his brother) and of Gallifrey. Russell adds a bit to the canon here where Time Lord children are taken from their families at the age of eight to look into the Untempered Schism - a weak point in the flow of time and space where the Time Vortex can be glimpsed in full.
Some would be inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad. The latter being the Doctor's theory about what happened to the Master. The Doctor, of course, ran away and never stopped. However, the implication here is that the Sound of Drums was placed inside the Master's head there - something which will be confirmed in The End of Time.
Naturally, this raises up a few points of confusion given the history of Doctor Who. Namely, at no point in the history leading up to Utopia did the Master ever mention having a drumming noise in his head. This is a very blatant retcon, and definitively paints the Master as completely insane rather than just being a sociopath with an overwhelming megalomania.
I don't actually have a problem with this, per se, but a lot of purists do. The reason for it (as we'll find out in The End of Time) is really kind of stupid and I admit that it makes absolutely no sense to bring in a retcon like this so many years in.
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| A common reaction to a Russell T. Davies script - 2007, colorized |
This, by the way, is advice that Chris Chibnall would not follow and would actually do even worse to not follow, but we have about nine years between now and then and I might just be able to deal with how absolutely awful The Timeless Child was by the time I'm thirty-nine. Hope springs eternal.
After some reminiscing by the Doctor and flashbacks that call into question Time Lord fashion choices, Jack reveals that he's been working for Torchwood. The Doctor expresses disappointment and rage, while Jack defends himself. Like much of the drama in the Russell T. Davies era, this is never brought up again after this scene.
Thanks to files from Vivian Rook, they learn of the Archangel Satellite System, and the Doctor works out that the Master has managed to work a form of hypnosis on not just the UK, but the entire planet. The Doctor says this is why he wasn't able to detect the Master before, saying that he's usually able to recognize when another Time Lord is around. This harkens back to Dalek, when Nine mentioned that he could sense other Time Lords in the universe and couldn't sense any of them.
It's also contradicted by a few instances in the classic show where the Doctor is unable to do this when running into other Time Lords, as well as later in the Revived Series - ironically in a Master episode, but we'll get to that later.
Regardless, the Doctor works out a plan. With SCIENCE!, he jimmy-rigs three TARDIS keys into personal perception filters. After some shipteasing where Jack has caught on to what the Doctor hasn't concerning Martha's feelings, the three head out to save the day.
The Master, meanwhile, is meeting with not-George W. Bush, who has taken control of the situation with the blessing of the United Nations. The Master mugs it up and acts generally insufferable, the President threatening to remove him from office using UN regulations...which I'm almost certain isn't actually a thing, but never mind.
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| FROM MY HEART AND FROM MY HAND WHY DON'T PEOPLE UNDERSTAND, MY INTENTIONS? |
Also, as you'd expect for a pastiche of someone the writer hates, Not-Bush is an ass.
The Doctor, Martha, and Jack watch the proceedings, and see Martha's family get transferred. Jack mentions going up behind the Master and breaking his neck, which the Doctor refutes with the defense that the Master is his responsibility.
At this point, the Doctor knows that the Master has used two incarnations out of a brand new regeneration cycle of thirteen. The Doctor, himself, has suffered far more grievous injuries than having his neck broken and still managed to regenerate - so there's no reason for him to assume the Master could not do the same. Death for a Time Lord really isn't all that special, considering it leads into a new life provided they aren't in their thirteenth incarnation.
We're invested in the Doctor's regeneration because it's a a switching of the actors. So, it's really only interesting because of that meta-perspective, and it's still led to some of the greatest stories in the series. In-universe, it's not really that big of a deal except in special circumstances or for the Doctor's companions that remain between incarnations who have to deal with the change. Thus, having these big, cataclysmic events centered around them makes them a little more than they should be as well as kind of cheapening them. With one noteable exception.
That's Time of the Doctor, by the way, not The End of Time. I'll get into why those worked and didn't work, respectively, in due time.
For now, the trio use Jack's vortex manipulator as a teleport to hop onboard the aircraft (with the emphasis on air) carrier Valiant, where first contact with the Toclafane is due to take place the next morning. All I know is that S.H.I.E.L.D. is so gonna sue the United Nations for this.
They find the TARDIS, which the Master has apparently "cannibalized" into what the Doctor calls a Paradox Machine. When asked if he can stop it, the Doctor claims he can't until he knows what it's for...which makes no sense, but we wouldn't have a second part of the episode otherwise.
Also, the Cloister Bell is going off in case you didn't get the message that things are going very, very bad.
Up on the flight deck, everyone gets into position for the worldwide broadcast. The Doctor plans to slip his TARDIS key around the Master's neck, the perception filter cutting off his psychic influence on humanity.
The Toclafane emerge, want nothing to do with Not-Bush, and the Master takes over before the TARDIS team can get to him. He mugs, then immediately switches into murder/death mode by having the Toclafane murder Not-Bush. The Doctor gets wrestled to the ground, Jack gets killed by the Master's laser screwdriver, and the Master reveals a bit of Professor Lazarus' technology in his laser screwdriver.
With the use of the Doctor's severed hand as matching DNA, the Master puts the Doctor into some really really dodgy extreme old-age makeup. Jack hands Martha his Vortex manipulator, and the Master brings in Martha's family to torment her further.
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| "I'd like a large...what? EXTRA THICC! What's that? Thirty minutes or it's free? Excellent! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!" |
The Doctor demands to know what the Toclafane are, the Master telling him that his hearts would break if he knew.
The paradox machine is activated, six billion Toclafane flood in through a rift in the sky and rain down mass slaughter on Earth - the Master ordering them to remove one-tenth of the human population.
The Doctor whispers something to Martha that goes unheard by the audience. Whatever he says causes her to cry but - after a mournful look at her family - she uses the Vortex Manipulator to escape.
She emerges on Earth, watching the chaos unfold in London. She declares that she's coming back.
The Master and Lucy hold the Doctor up to see the chaos, the Master declaring that the human race is no more. He looked down upon his new dominion, as Master of All, and he thought it good.
The Sound of Drums is an absolute mess, if my stopping to complain about certain points wasn't any indication. Would I call it bad? Yes. To level with you all here - I did actually like this and the following episode on initial broadcast. I even liked John Simms as the Master.
With time, and reflection (and watching both the Classic Series and seeing where the Revived has gone), my tastes have changed significantly as I see things and realize things that I didn't before.
John Simms was cast and set up with being the sort of dark mirror of David Tennant's Tenth Doctor. Normally, I'd be okay with this, but the direction has got to be poor here seeing as he does much better later. In both The End of Time and World Enough and Time, he's much better. Here, he's a mugging jackass who I'm honestly waiting for someone to punch in the mouth. Or shoot repeatedly in his face until the gun goes "click".
Besides the logistical gaps and lore breaks (minute though they are), this episode is dragged down a bit by being a two-parter. This is usually the reverse of my usual complaint where an episode is given too little time to really fully develop. Pacing is a problem in the Revived Show in general, but this isn't too bad. In this instance, too much time is used and things are developed...but not really that well. Everything feels like so much waiting until we reach the punchline.
Some scenes are good. I like the scene between the Doctor and the Master on the phone and the bit where the Doctor describes Gallifrey to Jack and Martha, but that's really it.
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| "Don't worry! It's about to get even dumber! WEEEEEEEEEEE!!!" |
Next up, we have Last of the Time Lords. We've finally made it to the end of Series 3, everyone! But will we survive the end of Series 3? Martha's faith in the Doctor is put to the ultimate test (except not really) and Russell T. Davies does the second-most ridiculous thing he's done in any of his finales - namely turning the Doctor into Jesus!
No, I'm not joking.
I really, really wish I were.
Doctor Who is the property of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
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