MONDO EXTRAS

In those fantasy books, they have White Magic and Dark Magic and sometimes High Magic? But then Hearn goes hunting and that's Wild Magic, and that's the Doctor, and it will fuck you up no matter how beautiful it is. You can't hang out with the sun. The sun, we've seen, is terrible to his ex-wives. Glory is the new Grace -- terrible glory, like Galadriel. How do you limit the limitless? How do you tell God He's getting too big for His britches? The whole "ramp up/ramp down" thing means shite if you're God: those are just people rules. His ramp goes up forever. But that means one day he'll just be a strange lonely boy in the marketplace, you know? It won't matter if he's alone or not, because he'll be alone. So something has to knock him down again. The Third Testament: the death of God, or His complete submission.

I thought this episode presaged a very intense finale: that the Doctor would be forced by the mysterious Mr. Saxon into a situation so terrible and frightening and world-ending that he would have to pull a Bad Wolf, that he would become terrible, worse than Saxon, all Galadriel-style tainted by too much divinity and not enough humanity; that Martha would have to "stop" him literally, that her Quest would end in the murder of God. That what he was foretelling was his own failure, and not a rote description of the Master's actions start to finish. Which would have been interesting, to say the least. And it's not that those things didn't happen, exactly, but that they happened in the wrong order, to the wrong people, in the wrong way. I was right by being wrong, because I didn't account for the connections and love and mirroring between the Doctor and the Master that make that story workable. If you split the Doctor into two beings, light and dark; if you set them at each other, chained up by love and hate and madness, that's...pretty much exactly what happens. The word "last" is a lot like "buffalo": it can be plural or singular. Are they, the Doctor and the Master, the two last Time Lords? Or are they, together, the last one there is? Is God really just a very large vase? I like the ending of this season, a LOT, and by the time you read this you'll know whether you'll agree. But I still love this episode.