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Monday 11 February 2013

Best Of Who Awards: Top 5 Greatest Plot Arcs


Which running strands through each modern season had the best build-up, impact and pay-off? Our Top 5 choices are here...
Ever since Doctor Who returned in 2005, the show has adopted an intrinsic ‘series arc’ structure each season that has allowed either a subtle or major plot strand to run throughout all thirteen episodes. It’s something that would probably have been too ambitious in the 1963-1989 classic era, yet now could prove to have been one of the best additions to the science-fiction saga. For this week’s instalment of our Best Of Who awards, then, we’re looking back at the greatest plot arcs we’ve seen since Who returned eight years ago, and indeed speculating where some ongoing mysteries could lead in the future…
5. THE DARKNESS IS COMING (2008)- Rose Tyler told Donna Noble just this in Turn Left, feeding into an arc of disappearing bees, growing portents of the Reality Bomb that Davros would create, and indeed of the Noble legacy in the universe. Russell T Davies seemed to revel in the ambition of this multi-layered Season Four strand, and for the most part beyond Rose’s second departure, the pay-off was hugely satisfying.
4. YOU ARE NOT ALONE (2007)- “I’m a Time Lord. I’m the last of the Time Lords.” As Chris Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor lamented his losses way back in The End Of The World in 2005, he couldn’t anticipate that there was in fact another Time Lord surviving in the universe. Sure enough, come Season Three we learned through Derek Jacobi that the Master had hidden himself via a fob watch, something the Doctor realised a moment too late as the Face Of Boe’s titular final words formed an acronym of YANA…
3. THE CRACKS IN TIME (2010)- Steven Moffat had a hell of a lot of nerve, bringing his first season of Doctor Who with an audacious arc running through every episode. More and more, cracks showed up in Season Five, building towards the opening of the Pandorica and Silence across the universe. That this was just one plot by the Silence to stop the Time Lord reaching the Fields Of Trenzalore was testament to how far the Moff has thought this long arc out.
2. RIVER SONG (2008-)- When a woman named Professor River Song first appeared back in Season Four’s Steven Moffat tale Silence In The Library, we as viewers couldn’t possibly imagine how far reaching the consequences would be. Alex Kingston’s character has been fascinating to watch develop in her past, present and future guises, and although it could be argued she got a little too much exposure in 2011’s Season Six alongside the ‘Death Of The Doctor’ arc, her The Angels Take Manhattan role was more than enough compensation!
1. HE WILL KNOCK FOUR TIMES (2009)- Perhaps the most successful part of this 2009 arc for Doctor Who was its brevity and final impact. In Planet Of The Dead, psychic Carmen warned David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor that “Your song is ending. It is returning through the dark. And then, oh but then…he will knock four times”, then in The Waters Of Mars the Doc electrocuted a member of the Flood before he could make the knocks to signal his regeneration. Ultimately, though, there’s no escaping fate, and when Wilfred Mott tapped on the glass nuclear cabinet, requiring the Doctor’s sacrifice to save his loyal ally, it was the perfect tragic conclusion to the tale of the Time Lord’s tenth incarnation. In the space of four episodes, Russell T Davies perfectly prepared us for the demise of one of the greatest Doctors, yet that didn’t make the final pay-off any less heartbreaking.

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