Doctor Who Series 3:Episodes 12&13
Season Finale -- The Sound of Drums /Last of the Time Lords
Aug 6, 2007
The Sound of Drums opens with the Doctor, Martha and Captain Jack materializing in an alleyway. Confronted with a ravening mob intent on dining out on them, they’ve pressed the button on Jack’s vortex manipulator and teleported back to 2007.
It’s Election Day and Britain has a new Prime Minister. They watch with horror as they see the face of Harold Saxon, newly elected Prime Minister…better known to the Doctor as the Master. He has used the satellite phone network to brainwash the population – a recurring theme in Doctor Who.
Almost before they can draw breath, they are running for their lives; a bomb destroys Martha’s flat, her family are taken into custody and a gloating Master has assassinated the Cabinet – and then announces First Contact with an alien race, the Toclafane.
"The Toclafane are a made up name," the Doctor says.
They teleport onto the aircraft carrier Valiant. The Master has a laser screwdriver that uses Lazarus technology in reverse, which he uses to age the Doctor by a hundred years.The Doctor can only watch as the Master open a rift which allows the Toclafane through – and their first action is to attack. Martha manages to escape using the teleporter, but the world seems helpless in the face of the onslaught.
The Last of the Time Lords opens a year later, when a small boat lands on a deserted beach, and a lone woman gets out. “You must be Martha Jones,” the man waiting for the boat says. For the last year, the world has been under the iron rule of the Master and Toclafane; Europe is a radioactive wasteland, the Japanese islands in ruins.
Martha has spent that last year walking the world. She needs to meet a scientist called Professor Macfarlane (Ellie Hyde), so her courier smuggles her into London, where they capture and dismantle a Toclafane captive. To her horror, it recognizes Martha and greets her by name. “The skies were full of diamonds,” it says, quoting what a child said in Utopia.
The Toclafane are the survivors of the ship full of people who made it to Utopia, only to find it uninhabitable. To survive, they have to cannibalize every last thing, even their bodies, turning them into a society of psychopaths ready to follow the Time Lord they perceive as their saviour.
The Doctor and the Jones family stage a revolt in which they try to overpower the Master, but it fails and he turns the device onto the Doctor on full blast, aging him to his full nine hundred years, and putting him in a cage. The Doctor’s humiliation is complete, the Master’s triumph almost total.
Martha tells the Professor that she is assembling a weapon that will kill the Master. The last component is in London, where they are going to overnight. But the Professor rings the Master, and his men swoop.
Taken to the Valiant, the Master spares them long enough to witness his attack on the rest of the Universe; for the last year the Earth has been stripped and cannibalized to make a fleet of hundreds of thousands of missiles.
The Doctor has one final plan to avert the crisis…
The finale to the third season is the first time that a Doctor or assistant has not been written out, but if anything this has freed Russell T. Davies to come up with the finest ending yet. There is a almost Biblical feel to the episode, with Martha cast in the Wandering Jew role, the Master and Doctor re-enacting Armageddon; the scale of the language is epic; Martha says “I’ve walked the world – I saw the islands of Japan burn.”
And there is a final Moebius loop as Captain Jack makes his farewells, and Martha tells the Doctor that she will not be accompanying him.
