(If you haven’t seen the episode, fair warning: here be spoilers.)
The saddest thing about Journey’s End is the contrast between the Doctor having a TARDIS full of friends and family and the end scene where he is alone in the TARDIS. If you watch Confidential for this episode, the people at BBC say that the Doctor is at his most powerful when he is alone and that he is a tragic character.
There comes a point when it is too much, though. At the end of every season in the new series he has been alone (with the exception of season 1, where the Doctor himself regenerated). He has lost everyone. Now, when he finally has a chance to find some sort of closure with Rose, he leaves her at Bad Wolf Bay just like he did at the end of season 2. (The video is “Almost Lover” by Piratewench32.)
And how does DoctorDonna (10.2) fit into the series itself? In the episode, apparently all of the time lines were converging on Donna towards the creation of DoctorDonna. Why then is 10.2 just dumped on the bay with Rose and abandonned? Is he a clone just to make Rose happy? Rae has some excellent thoughts on this.
Maybe this constant tragedy is getting ready to build the Doctor into the Valeyard, the Doctor’s last incarnation. For the Valeyard to exist, then Gallifrey could not have been destroyed because the Valeyard is the prosecutor in the episodes of Trial of a Time Lord, which takes place on Gallifrey.
Rae, a fabulous fan fiction author of Doctor Who stories (mostly Rose/Ten stories), has some excellent insights on her LiveJournal blog. She posted a link to a video below that summarises many of her disappointments in Journey’s End. The video is “The Doctor Returns – Alt. Ending (Journey’s End)” by abstractvmilk.
What will the future hold as Steven Moffat takes over for Russell T. Davies? The BBC reported on Moffat’s appearance at ComicCon–including that he intends to not bring back the Daleks.
