The Destiny of the Doctor mini-series comes to a close with the Tenth and the Eleventh Doctors, the latter being the big finale connecting them all together. “Death’s Deal”, the Tenth Doctor story, is good fun as its read by Catherine Tate, though that does mean the dramatic bits are a little lost. The finale on the other hand is good but bit of an anti-climax at the time, after ten months of build-up. What’s it like now listening to all of them so close together? Well…
“Death’s Deal” is set on the planet of… Death’s Deal, which is known to be one of the most hostile planets in the universe, to the point where thrill-seekers pay large amounts of money to visit it. The Doctor and Donna (Catherine Tate) visit the planet because of the old chestnut of the TARDIS picking up distress signals and they soon get caught up with a crashed tourist ship carrying, among others, the multi-tentacled gastropod Krux (Duncan Wisbey), a space pirate called Tad Groogan and a young girl called Lyric Erskine. The TARDIS is soon gobbled up by a large worm-like creature so everyone decides to head to a another spaceship nearby to escape but The Doctor decides to follow Groogan as he’s after the wreckage of a ship called the “Howling Jupiter” and the ship had a message simple called “Allons-y”, meaning it was clearly meant for him. When they get there the message is from the Eleventh Doctor, telling his past self that the “Wraith Mining Cartel” in on the way to planet to take “Slaughter Crystals” and he must not only stop them but meet Professor Merritt Erskine and use his research on the crystals to expose the WMC and stop the mining.
On the way out Donna and Krux disappear down a cavern when the worm reappears and Lyric reveals she came to the planet to find Prof. Merritt as he’s her father who vanished on the planet six years ago when the WMC, who he worked for, sent him here and then shot his ship down. While escaping The Doctor and Lyric are confronted by a wild man who believe he rules the planet using his staff (which is tipped with a Slaughter Crystal) and this is of course Prof. Erskine (also voiced by Duncan Wisbey). Lyric tries to get through to her father but it doesn’t work, and the reappearing Groogan tries to steal the valuable crystal but a mere scratch from it causes him to decay into nothingness. Blimey, slaughter crystals indeed! Meanwhile Donna and Krux realise the caverns they’re in weren’t natural and that they’re in the path of the massive worm and are soon swallowed whole…
The Doctor’s shocked and Donna doesn’t care…. makes sense!
Finally, and I mean FINALLY, the Eleventh Doctor story is “The Time Machine” and sees him arrive in Oxford on November 23rd 2013 to meet Professor Chivers (Michael Cochrane) and his assistant Alice (Jenna Coleman, who also narrates. Not sure if this is supposed to be a Clara splinter or not, mind you…) The Doctor complains that the machine shouldn’t exist, especially as a Time Lord hypercube is part of its design. Chivers says that he built it because his future self sent the instructions to him, so as long as he does that soon it will close the loop and there’ll be no issue. The Doctor on the other hand touches the cube and sees an insectoid species called the Creevix (voiced by Nicholas Briggs) who soon invade causing The Doctor and Alice to run. They eventually reach the TARDIS but find they can only go forwards or backwards 20 years, and the future is full of time machines and Creevix controlling humanity, the pair only escaping via one of the other machines. Here they find the hypercube and a Time Agency ID belonging to one Guy Taylor, so they send the Cube to him thinking it was what was destined to happen but all this does is knock Taylor’s craft mid-flight and causes it to “crash” through the vortex and into the dimension where the Creevix are from, giving them a way into the universe in the first place.
With all hope lost The Doctor presses the cube to his head and starts sending out messages, but the Creevix claim its futile and soon Alice is sent back in time with the cube and the notes to make sure Chivers creates the Time Machine in the first place and start the whole loop. The Doctor is trapped in a cage and forced to witness the end of his universe…
They’re both fun stories but I felt neither reader was great, Catherine Tate was fine with the parts that feature Donna but the issue was a good majority of the story doesn’t feature her at all, and Jenna Coleman was fine but not super-engaging.
The Continuity:
Neither “Death’s Deal” or “The Time Machine” have any continuity to other stories, really. Well, apart from the latter directly connecting to the other Destiny of the Doctor releases, anyway (which can be found HERE, HERE and HERE!)
Overall Thoughts:
I wonder why they had Jenna Coleman in to record the story but didn’t have Clara in it…
Destiny of the Doctor comes to an … okay close. I think if I had this site back in 2013 I’d have been a lot more down on the final part as it was the pay-off to 10 months worth of build up but ended up being just more of the same, really. Now it was just more of the same but I knew that going in, so it’s just sort of… fine. An interesting experiment, but I personally, won’t be listening to them again.
“Death’s Deal” sees Donna and Krux survive being eaten thanks to latter eating the former whole to protect her from the worm’s juices, which hearing Donna’s reaction was worth the price of admission! Meanwhile The Doctor and Lyric are brought to a crater with a massive crystal creature and are forced to the edge as sacrifices, smaller creatures under the Professor’s control herding them towards there deaths. Donna and Krux escape the worm and find the TARDIS, and although Krux is injured by some crystalline creatures they both get in the ship in time and Donna sends a message to The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, allowing him to call the TARDIS to him, a move that agitates the creatures around him, tipping him off as to why the planet’s creatures were so aggressive: they’re sensitive to technology and all the crashed ships and distress signals were what was driving them mad. Lyric and her father tumble over the edge of the crater but the professor saves his daughter at the cost of his life when he opens his locket and sees a picture of her, snapping him back to reality. The Doctor saves Lyric and notices that the locket has a hard drive of all the data his next incarnation told him to get. The Doctor and Donna offer Lyric and Krux a way home but they decide to stay for a proper rescue now the creatures of the world were calm (the Doctor shut off all the electronics) That’s that!
As for the overall finale: Just as Alice arrives and talks to Chivers the two are greeted by two Creevix but Chivers can’t bring himself to step into the machine, then something goes wrong with the Hypercube as the Doctor’s voice tells them to step away from the aliens before he appears in person. He reveals that Chivers is actually Cedric from the first DOTD story and that he sent a message to Susan to make sure he would go on to meet his wife at a Bob Dylan concert and have children and grandchildren, which Alice claims he never had before. The Doctor says that he didn’t, but that one small change in 1963 made him hesitate to step into The Time Machine and that’s all the change he needed. He then reveals why he sent each of the ten messages to his ten previous selves, including OhOne from the Seventh Doctor story ending up marrying Lyric from the Tenth Doctor story at a chapel approved by the then-mayor of New Vegas James McNeil from the Ninth Doctor story and together they had a son who ended up being Guy Taylor, now guaranteed to be alive and not get knocked off course.
The tech and artefacts from the other stories are used to both guide the Creevix to this specific time and place and to make sure The Doctor had some things on hand in that office right then and there to put together a method to send the Creevix back to their own dimension and stop them from ever having made their way through, which is exactly what he does! Guy Taylor arrives and soon he and Alice leave together while Cedric Chivers finally puts two and two together and figures out that The Doctor is indeed the same old man he met in 1963 and watches on with a smile as he leaves to travel once more…
Hogan Reviews 