The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, by James Mortimer

On first watching The Sound of Drums in 2007, I was blown away, but kept my commentary for the following week, posting merely (under the title “Anticipation“):

♪ ♪ ♪ ♩.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♩.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♩.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♩.

I was disappointed however by Last of the Time Lords.

Well, It wasn’t actually bad, but it was disappointing; didn’t rise to the heights of Blink, or even of the two previous season finales. The pacing was curiously off, almost always a problem with RTD scripts.

Martha in general was pretty cool throughout, including her (temporary?) departure, and her links with the real world. The devastated Earth was well done, though you know immediately that this means that the cast just have to find the Reset button and press it.

I did like the Doctor/Master relationship, and the Doctor’s devastation at being the last of his people again, even though I am Old Skool enough that I cannot really believe it is the Master without a beard or a decaying face.

The Doctor-goes-all-glowy bit is, IMHO, actually a homage to the end of the Pertwee story The Mutants, where the same effect is tried (not on the Doctor but on another character) and done really really badly. Several other Pertwee-era homages, mainly to stories I haven’t seen (Claws of Axos, Sea Devils).

The Doctor-turns-into-Dobby-the House-elf bit was, sadly, rubbish; and the Master keeping Martha’s family alive on the off-chance that she might show up doesn’t make sense.

Jack didn’t get much to do except turn into the future Face of Boe, did he? And Mrs Master did hardly anything except shoot her husband. Waste of good characters.

When I came to my Great New Who Rewatch in 2013, I was no less forgiving:

The “with a bound they were free” transition [from Utopia] to The Sound of Drums is a bit annoying given the buildup to the cliffhanger the previous week, but after that we are on fairly solid ground again, with Simm’s Master’s first appearance being much his best. Despite his obvious insanity, at this stage his intention to simply capture the Doctor and friends and do unspecified nasty things is pretty clear, and it gives the plot a terrific momentum. Apart from the regulars, Alexandra Moen is superb as Lucy Saxon, given few lines but an inescapable presence. And the continuity with Old Who’s Gallifrey is terrifically pleasing, and completes a theme we’ve had since the start of the season (if we count The Runaway Bride as such). I found that I didn’t even mind the “Here Come the Drums” song as much on rewatch; I felt it intrusive first time round.

And then, alas, we have Last of the Time Lords. On first watching, I was just slack-jawed in disbelief that such a promising setup had been so badly wasted, and unable to articulate quite why I hated it so much. This time round, I knew what was coming so was spared the crashing disappointment of the first broadcast, and actually thought it was not quite as awful as I had remembered. But that is not saying much.

Where it fails first, I think, is that the humiliation meted out to the Doctor and friends by the Master is neither funny nor interesting. There’s something very skeevy indeed about making some of the most visible black characters ever in the show into slaves, and the script never quite acknowledges that. Torturing Jack Harkness is just nasty. Turning the Doctor into Dobby the House Elf is bizarre and incomprehensible, and then transforming him into Tinkerbell at the end is an appalling lapse of dramatic judgment. The story of Martha is a decent enough plot thread (and of course Freema Agyeman carries it well), and the Doctor’s emotion for the Master is effective but would have been a lot more so without the previous 40 minutes, and the massive plot reset button actually comes as a relief because of the inanity of what has come before.

Rewatching both episodes again ten years on, I remain of the same view. The Sound of Drums is fast-paced, exciting, and builds anticipation. Last of the Time Lords squanders that for the sake of spectacle, always an obsession of RTD’s. Ten years on, I’m also more aware of just how good an actress Adjoa Andoh is, and how much she is wasted as Martha’s mother. It’s the first (but not the last) example of New Who getting the season finale not quite right.

The one point that did jump out at me was the Tenth Doctor’s invitation to the Master:

MASTER: You still haven’t answered the question. What happens to me?
DOCTOR: You’re my responsibility from now on. The only Time Lord left in existence.
JACK: Yeah, but you can’t trust him.
DOCTOR: No. The only safe place for him is the Tardis.
MASTER: You mean you’re just going to keep me?
DOCTOR: Mmm. If that’s what I have to do. It’s time to change. Maybe I’ve been wandering for too long. Now I’ve got someone to care for.

The Twelfth Doctor more or less does exactly this with Missy. I had not spotted that before.

There are two spinoffs available about Martha’s year of circumnavigating the globe. The first was The Story of Martha, a 2008 anthology of three novellas, edited and with a linking narrative by Dan Abnett. When I read it in 2010, I wrote:

A book set during the year while the Master ruled the Earth, as seen at the end of New Who Season 3, with a rather good linking narrative by Dan Abnett, during the course of which Martha recounts four of her past adventures with the Doctor to people she meets. The embedded stories are less good than the framing narrative, with the exception of Robert Shearman’s excellent “The Frozen Wastes”.

You can get it here.

More recently, Big Finish produced three stories with Freema Agyeman as Martha and Adjoa Andoh as Francine. Here’s the trailer.

After listening to it last year, I wrote:

…better [than the Abnett anthology], getting off to an excellent start in The Last Diner by the always reliable James Goss, a more Western-y The Silver Medal by Tim Foley, and a well-executed climax in Deceived by Matt Fitton. Martha is joined by Adjoa Andoh playing her mother Francine, who has apparently escaped the Master, and Serin Ibrahim as old friend Holly. (Also Clare Louise Connolly plays the Toclafane in all three stories.) Guest stars include Marina Sirtis, best known as Deanna Troi in Star Trek, in the first episode.

You can get it here.

James Mortimer’s Black Archive analysis of the two-parter starts with the premise that both episodes are equally good (or bad) in different ways, which as will be by now fairly clear is not my starting point. (And I’m not alone – IMDB users rate The Sound of Drums at 8.7 out of 10, and Last of the Time Lords at 8.3.)

The first of three long chapters, “The Saxons”, looks in depth at the Master as developed over the years to this point, and at the problematic depiction of Lucy and the Jones family.

The second chapter, “The Heroes”, looks in even more depth at Martha and at her relationship with the Doctor, and the problematic aspects of that portrayal.

The third chapter, “The Lonely God”, starts with the Doctor as religious figure and then diverts into the Hero’s Journey as engaged in by Martha and the justification for the Toclafane. Its second paragraph, with footnotes, is:

This idea of a ‘lonely god’ is reinforced by the use of religious imagery that Davies deploys throughout the series. Indeed, when the Doctor is ‘transfigured into a being of light’² at the close of Last of the Time Lords, in a process generated by what the Master calls ‘prayer’, it’s hard to deny the visual similarities to how one might imagine the return of a Messiah. It is, in Davies’ words, a ‘glorious’ return³. When the Doctor forgives the Master, it is hard not to be aware of the religious connotations of this.
² McCormack, Una, ‘He’s Not The Messiah: Undermining Political and Religious Authority in Doctor Who’, in Bradshaw, Simon, Anthony Keen and Graham Sleight, eds, The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T Davies Era of the New Doctor Who (2011), p51.
³ Davies, The Valiant Quest.

The conclusion returns again to the issue of Lucy’s black eye and the enslavement of the Joneses and expresses disappointment that these are not well addressed in the episode itself.

An appendix justifies treating Utopia as “a separate story even if it’s not a separate arc”.

I’m afraid that this is not my favourite Black Archive. Mortimer has written much more about the second episode than the first, and that’s not where I’d have placed the balance. He raises a lot of good questions, but some of his points are rather belaboured. The Black Archives have a lot more hits than misses, but this is one of the weaker volumes. You can get it here.

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The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, by James Mortimer

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