Doctor Who: The End of Tennant

[Zeke]

Almost time for part 2. It's already aired in Britain, but I'm watching the Canadian premiere tonight. SPACE is building up to it with a marathon of "Season 5", i.e. the Doctor Who specials Tennant has done since S4 ended. I'd already seen The Next Doctor (which rocked) and Planet of the Dead (which was okay). I hadn't yet seen The Waters of Mars, so I watched that. It was pretty unremarkable, but it did set the stage a bit more for End of Time; the Doctor's heightened emotional state makes a little more sense now.

Mars also addressed something that needed attention: the Doctor's arrogance. Some of his incarnations are more full of themselves than others, and over the last four years, Tennant's Tenth Doctor has been increasingly comfortable playing God. ("I'm the Doctor! There IS no higher authority!") Now he's outright declared himself a "Time Lord victorious" who can do whatever he wants with the timeline; everyone he would have had to answer to is dead. And I can understand that. It's exhilarating to realize that something is completely under your control; in the Doctor's place, I'd probably do the same. But as someone other than the Doctor, I'm not impressed, and neither was the person he broke the rules for. (Her reaction was unreasonably extreme, though; she only knew she was fated to die because he told her about half an hour ago. Apparently that little talk was so convincing she wouldn't abide him changing his mind.)

Okay, time for part 2. I'll post about that in due time (and Nate, I'll answer your points as well).