Last of the Time Lords

191c - Last of the Time Lords
Cast
Doctor David Tennant (Tenth Doctor)
Companion Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones)
Production
Directed by	Colin Teague
Written by	Russell T. Davies
Executive producer(s)	Russell T. Davies Julie Gardner
Production code	3.13
Series	Series 3
Running time	3 of 3 episodes, 52 mins
First broadcast	30 June 2007
Chronology
← Preceded by "The Sound of Drums" Followed by → "Voyage of the Damned"

"Last of the Time Lords" is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was broadcast on BBC One on 30 June 2007, and is the thirteenth and final episode of Series 3 of the revived Doctor Who series.

Synopsis

One year after the events of "The Sound of Drums", the Master has conquered Earth and enslaved its population. He holds the aged Doctor prisoner, and prepares warships for a new Time Lord Empire. Now it is up to Martha Jones to carry out the Doctor's plan to save the world.

Plot

File:Doctor archangel.jpg

The Doctor, newly rejuvenated, shows the Master the power of the human race.

A year after the events of The Sound of Drums, Earth has been closed to all species and labelled as in "terminal extinction". Martha returns to Britain, having travelled the world since teleporting away from the Valiant at the moment of the Master's triumph. Her TARDIS key, still generating a perception filter, has kept her hidden all this time. She meets Thomas Milligan, a doctor-turned-freedom-fighter, who can lead her to one Professor Docherty. Martha herself has become a figure of hope against the Master, rumoured to be the only one capable of killing him. She and Tom form an immediate bond.

Meanwhile, on the Valiant, the Master is keeping the aged Doctor in a 'dog-kennel' tent as his humiliated prisoner, Martha's family as his servants, and Captain Jack Harkness in chains. Lucy Saxon is still his companion, but he has a 'harem' from which to choose a masseuse; Lucy appears to have a bruised eye as though she has been beaten. The Master shows the Doctor the world he has created: the new Time Lord Empire. Across the planet, warships are being built to wage war on the rest of the universe. The Doctor has "only one thing to say", but the Master doesn't want to hear it. After a failed attempt by the Jones family, Jack and the Doctor to gain control by stealing the Master's Laser screwdriver, the Master sends out a transmission intended for Martha. Watching in Docherty's lab, she sees the Master suspend the Doctor's capacity to regenerate and age him by a further nine hundred years, shrinking him into a tiny, frail creature. Instead of being dismayed, Martha draws hope from the Doctor's continued survival.

Though the Toclafane have proved to be virtually invincible, Martha reveals that she has once stumbled upon one that was struck by lightning, and with the data gathered from the incident Docherty is able to replicate the required conditions. Upon examining the sphere thus captured, they make a horrifying discovery: the Toclafane contain the conscious remains of the humans from the year 100 trillion. There was no Utopia, only more darkness, and with everything dying around them the humans cannibalised and regressed themselves, becoming the child-like Toclafane. The Master brought them back in time using the TARDIS, which could only travel between Utopia and present-day Earth. The contradiction of the Toclafane killing their own ancestors is made possible by the paradox machine built by the Master. Martha is horrified when the Toclafane quotes young Creet that she met on Malcassairo, telling her that the Toclafane have shared memories of the last of humanity. Tom shoots it dead when it says that killing is "fun".

When Docherty asks if the rumours about Martha are true, Martha reveals a gun, developed by Torchwood and UNIT, purportedly able to kill a Time Lord and prevent the ensuing regeneration. Martha has retrieved three of the four chemicals needed for the gun from their hiding places around the world, and has returned to London to find the fourth. After Martha and Thomas depart for a shelter in Bexley to hide, Docherty (who is desperate for information regarding her missing son) reveals their whereabouts to the Master.

The Master thus comes to Earth's surface to capture Martha, killing Tom, destroying the special gun and taking her back to the Valiant. He intends to execute her before the Doctor and her family, at the moment his fleet is launched. As the clock counts down, Martha reveals the real reason she travelled the globe. It wasn't for a fictional anti-regeneration gun, or to fight back, but merely to talk. She told everyone about the Doctor; specifically, she told everyone to think of the Doctor at the same time the Master plans to launch his fleet. Combined with the Master's Archangel satellite network, which the Doctor has had an entire year to get in tune with, this has the effect of charging the Doctor with the combined psychic energy of the people of Earth. Docherty's betrayal was expected, engineered by Martha so that she would be brought on board the Valiant to rejoin the Doctor. Drawing on the telepathic energy of millions of souls, the Doctor is able to restore his youth and foil the Master's plan. As the Master cowers, the Doctor says the words the Master was afraid to hear: "I forgive you."

With the Master out of the picture, Jack rounds up some soldiers to destroy the paradox machine, but is delayed by the Toclafane. The Master, using Jack's vortex manipulator, teleports himself and the Doctor to Earth, threatening to detonate his fleet and take the Earth with it. The Doctor knows that the Master can't kill himself, and manages to teleport both himself and the Master back to the Valiant just as Jack destroys the paradox machine, rewinding time to just after the US President is killed and just before the Toclafane arrive. All those on the Valiant remember the events due to being at "the eye of the storm", but to everyone else the Master's reign of terror is "the year that never happened".

The Master, now defenceless, is handcuffed and stands before the Doctor. The Doctor announces that, since the Master is a Time Lord, he is the Doctor's responsibility and will be imprisoned on board the TARDIS. Francine Jones is talked out of shooting the Master, but Lucy Saxon, with a glazed expression, seizes a gun herself and shoots the Master. Rather than be a prisoner for all eternity, the Master lets himself die, refusing to regenerate despite the Doctor's desperate pleas. Just before dying in his arch-opponent's arms, the Master muses on the constant drumming in his head, wondering if it will finally stop, and with a smile says, "I win", leaving the Doctor to weep for his lost adversary and fellow Time Lord. The Doctor cremates the Master's body on a pyre. However, after he leaves, a female hand (wearing red nail polish) is seen taking the Master's mysterious ring from the burnt-out pyre, with malevolent laughter echoing in the background.

In Cardiff, Jack decides to remain behind to look after his team "defending the Earth". The Doctor disables Jack's vortex manipulator to keep him from jumping through time unsupervised. The Doctor then tells Jack there's nothing that can be done about his immortality: it seems likely he'll never be able to die – though he is ageing. Thinking about what he might look like millions of years from now, Jack confesses his vanity – "I can't help it" – and recalls how, when he was "the first person from the Boeshane Peninsula to join the Time Agency", his "poster-boy" good looks earned him the nickname "the Face of Boe".

With the TARDIS repaired, the Doctor is ready to move on. Martha, however, has decided to stay so she can look after her family and finally qualify as a medical doctor. She gives the Doctor her phone so they can keep in touch and says she will see him again, but when someone is in love and it's unrequited, they have to get out: "this is me getting out". Leaving in the TARDIS, the Doctor begins to relax in the console room chair – until the ship is suddenly shaken with great force, and the bow of a ship smashes through the TARDIS' wall. Picking up a lifebelt, he finds "Titanic" written on it, to which he can only respond, "What?!"

Cast

• The Doctor — David Tennant
• Martha Jones — Freema Agyeman
• Jack Harkness — John Barrowman
• The Master — John Simm
• Lucy Saxon — Alexandra Moen
• Francine Jones — Adjoa Andoh
• Clive Jones — Trevor Laird
• Tish Jones — Gugu Mbatha-Raw
• Thomas Milligan — Tom Ellis
• Professor Docherty — Ellie Haddington
• Lad — Tom Golding
• Woman — Natasha Alexander
• Toclafane voices — Zoe Thorne, Gerard Logan, and Johnnie Lyne-Pirkis

Continuity

• Jack states that in his home era, he became a "poster boy" for his home, the Boeshane peninsula, and thus acquired the nickname "the Face of Boe". Writer Russell T. Davies, in the episode's commentary, called the implication of this scene "a theory" as to the Face of Boe's origins, prompting Executive Producer Julie Gardner to urge him to "stop backpedaling" about the two characters being the same. Davies also mentioned the addition of a line in "Gridlock" in which the Face of Boe calls the Doctor "old friend", thus suggesting a stronger connection between the characters.
• The Master makes reference to the Sea Devils and the Axons. The Doctor also makes references to the Axons and the Daleks.
• Earth is referred to as Sol 3, the third planet from the star Sol, as it was in The Deadly Assassin. Sol is the Latin name for the Sun, and is often used in science fiction.
• The Master's laser screwdriver is said to be isomorphically controlled, a property the Doctor attributed to the TARDIS in Pyramids of Mars; although other characters, such as Romana, have operated the TARDIS in the past.
• Clips from "Smith and Jones", "Utopia" and "The Sound of Drums" are used in this episode.
• After receiving a great amount of psychic energy, and rejuvenating himself, the Doctor says the line: "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry", a frequently used catchphrase of his.
• Martha mentions that she once met William Shakespeare ("The Shakespeare Code").
• When the Master is shot by Lucy Saxon he says, "It's always the women." He was previously shot by Chantho in "Utopia". Additionally, he has been defeated by Jo, Peri, Ace and Grace Holloway
• The Doctor's severed hand from "The Christmas Invasion", "Utopia", "The Sound of Drums" and various Torchwood episodes can be seen at the end of the episode inside the TARDIS.
• At the end of the episode, the Doctor says "What?!" three times, after the Titanic crashed through the TARDIS wall, which was his response to Donna at the end of Doomsday, when she appeared onboard the TARDIS.
• This does not appear to be the Doctor's first encounter with the Titanic. In "The End of the World" the Ninth Doctor stated that he had been onboard an "unsinkable" ship and that he "ended up clinging to an iceberg". In "Rose", Clive shows Rose evidence that someone that looked like the Ninth Doctor prevented a family from boarding the Titanic. The Doctor has also been on the Titanic in novels (for example, the Seventh Doctor in the Virgin New Adventures "The Left-Handed Hummingbird"), but the canon of the novels is in question.
• The hand seen picking up the Master's ring leaves open the possibility of reintroducing the Master at a later date, though Russell T Davies stated in the podcast for this episode that this would not occur in the 2008 series.

Production and publicity

• "Last of the Time Lords" was a subtitle proposed at one stage for a film version of Doctor Who that was in development from 1987 to 1994.
• This episode was planned to be broadcast live to the crowds attending Pride London in Trafalgar Square via a giant screen. However, a local curfew after the nearby attempted terrorist bombing the previous day prevented the broadcasting of the episode. Freema Agyeman and John Barrowman also attended.
• In order to keep the episode's details secret, access to preview copies of this episode was restricted. There was a similar moratorium on copies of "Doomsday" the previous year.
• The episode was allocated a 50-minute timeslot for its initial broadcast, as with "Daleks in Manhattan" previously, and 55-minute timeslots for the BBC Three repeats. According to Russell T. Davies in Doctor Who Magazine 384, this is because it ran over-length but they did not wish to lose the material. The official run time from freemaagyeman.com for the episode is almost 52 minutes. The final episode of The Trial of a Time Lord was also extended by five minutes in 1986.
• Reggie Yates is credited as playing Leo Jones; however, the character Leo only appears in this episode as background (in the scene in Martha's family's home, through a window). The audio commentary for the episode mentions that Leo was originally to appear in an earlier scene with Martha, but Yates was double-booked and the scene was re-written, with Leo replaced by Thomas Milligan.
• In the audio commentary, the producers reveal that Graeme Harper filled in to direct some scenes after director Colin Teague was injured.
• The name 'Toclafane' comes from the French for 'Fool the Fan'.
• Martha Jones will star in three episodes of Torchwood before returning to Doctor Who in the middle of the fourth series. The Doctor's new companion for the entire run of the fourth series is yet to be announced.