The Stolen Earth / Journey's End [TV/2008.6.28 ~ 7.5]

★★★☆☆

  Russell T Davies has his cake and eats it in spectacular fashion: a crossover between Doctor Who and its two TV spinoffs, an ending of an elaborate character arc, and Dalek action on a scale above what the show had displayed in previous years. This is probably the textbook example of Doctor Who as a blockbuster, with plenty of blazing guns and heroics to back it up. 

  The first part, The Stolen Earth, lets the audience know the stakes are high immediately — end-of-the-world loots, mass hysteria and carefully coordinated Dalek teams capturing innocents. It also does the often hard job of introducing supporting characters brilliantly, taking us through the realms of UNIT, the house of Sarah Jane and Torchwood. Every character bursts through the screen with the actors' full commitment, with an added sense of welcomeness fans of the respective spinoffs feel, and there comes this one important moment when the Doctor and Donna face his friends, his allies on the Earth and Murray Gold's music (repetitive, but always rising to the occasion) swells up to form a glorious emotion. The second part, Journey's End, has all the resolutions and new resolutions and new resolutions on top of that that one comes to expect from an RTD finale... and it lets the team down quite a bit. I enjoyed the two-parter quite a bit, with all its excitement and feeling of importance, but when the highest stakes ever are countered by what I feel are all-too-convenient events, I'm not gonna feel all that satisfied. Stands to reason why I've rewatched The Stolen Earth far more than I did Journey's End. Emotional climax aside (and even then, I don't think I needed a farewell on top of what Doomsday achieved), I just never found a reason to get back to part 2 specifically. K-9 may be cute, but no.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  I realize I was starting to sound quite pessimistic towards the end there, and the truth still is that I find The Stolen Earth and Journey's End incredibly watchable. It's almost two hours of nonstop running, technobabble, David Tennant having so much fun in his role and an Avengers-style crossover with multiple characters from the Doctor's lives... to say it still has entertainment value would be an understatement.