Chaos. That's my most lasting impression of this episode, which adds on to last week's parade of guest stars by bringing in Jackie Tyler and Mickey Smith over the opening credits. Not that they're not welcome, mind you. I like those characters. But is there any more room in an episode that already has Rose, Torchwood, Martha, Donna, Sarah Jane, Daleks, Davros, and special guest star Dalek Caan? (And, somewhere offscreen presumably, K9.) Well, yes, but not a lot of room.
Clearly Davies, though on for next year's specials, is tidying up the little universe he's built over four seasons before moving on. "Journey's End" starts out reasonably self-contained, if only because so many characters are in one place, being menaced by the Daleks after the Doctor's failed regeneration. (Did anyone not call that as a fake-out?) There's even room for some poignancy as the Doctor watches both Donna and the TARDIS get threatened. (Which bothers him more? You decide!) Then the naked semi-clone shows up and the whole thing shifts into some kind of weird overdrive. In Doctor Two we get Tennant emphasizing the most exaggerated tics of his performance and of Catherine Tate's Donna. (Tate responds in kind.) The music makes a comic shift signaling the first of many tonal changes that will plague trouble the rest of the episode.
I confessed last week that Davros was new to me so the impact of his arrival was a little blunted. I've watched this episode one and a half times now and I think I get his role a little better. But for such a big-deal bad guy, I'm not sure he's given enough breathing room. The revelation that Dalek Caan had made him a servant of the Daleks came as kind of a shrug to me. But I do love the exchange between Davros and the Doctor in which Davros starts to stir some our hero's old ire, causing Davros to refer to a past in which the Doctor "butchered millions."
Maybe that's why, following the failure of the Reality Bomb–courtesy of a Time Lord-infected Donna–and the revelation of Dalek Caan's betrayal of his own bloodthirsty people, he can still be upset at Doctor Two's decision to destroy the remaining Daleks. By Doctor Two's reckoning, he has no choice. Here is a pitiless race determined to dominate the universe. He flips the switch and kills them all. It's probably the same decision that the Time War-era Doctor would have made. And it might have been the one this Doctor would have been forced to make if it weren't for his semi-clone. Much of the season has dealt in Time Lord realpolitik and the hard decisions someone with the Doctor's power would have to make when there are lives in the balance. Doctor Two doesn't have to think about making the decision the Doctor would have to think about. Does this episode let him off the hook by putting the switch in somebody else's regenerated hand?