So, in my Time Lord Victorious meta, topaz_eyes posted a bit of cut dialogue from End of Time. It’s just a few lines from Wilf and the Doctor’s chat up in the Vinvocci spaceship, but it has completely overthrown my entire reading of the episode. Everything - OK, not everything, but the Doctor’s arc - suddenly makes sense in ways it didn’t before, and I feel sort of monumentally stupid for not seeing it before. Best of all, I don’t dislike Ten anymore. Oh, he’s still a selfish jerk (far more than I thought), but oh, he’s honest about it. Ramblings and a lot of repetition below the cut. (I don't have time to polish it, sorry.)

First of all, the dialogue in question:

WILF: But you said... you were told, he will knock four times. And then you die. That's him, isn't it, The Master? The noise in his head? The Master is going to kill you.

THE DOCTOR: Yeah.

WILF: Then kill him first.

(cut dialogue begins)

WILF (CONT'D) Don't you deserve it?

THE DOCTOR: Ohh yeah. Isn't that the truth? Got it in one! I deserve it, absolutely! I so deserve to live. Everything I've done, the lives I've saved, the people, the planets, every single star in the sky. So where is it, then? Just once. Where's the reward?

WILF: Then take it.

(cut dialogue ends)

THE DOCTOR: And that's how the Master started.

*happy sigh* Isn’t it amazing? I could CRY that it was cut. Because what I suddenly realised (and it’s so obvious!) is that Ten - throughout - has one single thought ticking away at the back of his mind: The Master is going to kill me. (Unless I kill him first...)

And this is where I went wrong - when the Ood showed him that the Master was returning, I presumed that he was still in his S3 mindset: That is, I thought that he valued the Master more than anything else. But oh, he doesn’t.

Now let’s just jump back to the end of WoM, when Ood Sigma comes for Ten, and Ten thinks it's to tell him about his death. So he runs. I always thought this was beautifully ironic, since they actually want to tell him about the impending End of Time. What I never took into account is that Ten - if viewed through the lens of those cut lines - immediately jumps to the conclusion that the resurrected Master is the one who's going to kill him. There's no question in his mind. (This also makes sense of that scene where he RUNS to his TARDIS after seeing the vision the Ood shared. I was always struck by how he seemed oddly frightened, but I ignored the thought because it didn't really fit. However, he IS scared - he thinks Death has come for him...)

Because Ten pivots everything around himself - and considering the frame of mind he’s in that’s not surprising. OK, so he clearly works out that there’s something big happening (something more than the Master), but underneath that is the presumption that whatever happens it’ll cause the Master to kill him.

And this is where it gets interesting (and oh so twisted - I love it too much for words!) - because, as we see from those cut lines from his conversation with Wilf, he thinks he can possibly save himself by killing the Master first. (The Laws of Time are HIS. Why should he bow to a prophecy?)

I presumed that the dilemma in that scene was the Doctor refusing to kill the Master for pretty much the same reasons he forgave him in LotT (except he wasn’t honest about it, and that grated - if you love someone more than the whole world, plz be honest about it) but I was so, so wrong.

Like I argued before, the Time Lord Victorious is still there, but the Doctor is not trying to save the Master - he’s desperately trying to save himself. Not his life, but the essence of who he is. (Look at Galadriel, fighting the tempation of the Ring, or Eleven - furious - in The Beast Below: ‘If I do this, I cease to be myself and I will lose my name.’) It is all a mirror for the Master of course, who always sought survival above all, and whom the Doctor suddenly understands on a completely new level and he's focussing everything he has on NOT turning into that dark mirror. (He even fears that his death will be permanent, so it's a hugely costly battle.)

Let me quote lyricwrites, who wrote beautifully about this in the comments:

THE DOCTOR: And that's how the Master started.

*boggles*

YES. HE DID.

It wasn't the noise. It was never the noise. Oh, the noise made him short-tempered, made him erratic, made him stand out in a society where conformity was king. It might have broken him eventually, but it never made him kill, or torture. It was that thought: I deserve.

I deserve respect. I deserve better. I deserve to be top of my class, that conniving creature who came in first probably cheated, or bribed the professor. I deserve familial praise that doesn't come with unspoken footnotes, especially considering that you're a little off, the psychologists never could find that drumming of yours, why do you have to stand out so? I deserve a boyfriend who doesn't quarrel with me, I deserve a relationship that's always as magical as the first night we stayed up until dawn talking about all the things we could do if only we had the freedom of the entire universe. In fact, don't I deserve a little bit of . . . adulation? Reverence, even? It's not as if I haven't worked for it, as if I'm not brilliant enough—why does the universe refuse to give me what I deserve?

Of course, I am a Time Lord. I could just . . . take it.

So this is at the heart of Ten’s dilemma - pretty much the whole of his characterisation & actions then turns around the fact that he thinks the only way to avoid death is by killing the Master first. His actions become negative space: Throughout he is not killing his oldest friend and not saving his own life.

But it also leaves him paralysed.

The Master holding the whole Earth 'hostage' as it were only makes his resolve firmer - the universe is giving him a get-out-of-jail card: The most perfect excuse (temptation) to kill the Master, but he won't take it (even if it leave the Earth lost), because he's also be doing it for personal gain - his whole reasoning has essentially boiled down to this one thing. He can’t kill the Master, because it means saving himself, and he can’t save himself, because that means turning into the Master... As catch-22s go, it’s hard to fault. (It's Biblical even: Whoever tries to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it.)

It takes the Timelords' return to snap him out of it. Or rather - to see that maybe there's someone else who's meant to be killing him (also he can live with destroying Gallifrey twice, what with all the universe being in the balance and all that). But more importantly he thinks he’s figured out how it works - he'll send the Time Lords back, and they will kill him in return. He finally sees a way of acting where he doesn't win.

And then the ending, and the four knocks and... Oh MY HEART! Because if Ten thinks he's been not just been saved from death, but from having to murder someone he loves in order to survive, then it follows much more logically that he completely loses it. Not that it wasn't logical before, but this whole EPIC struggle he's been fighting in his head was... for nothing. It was never kill or be killed. It was about simple sacrifice, the kind he usually makes without a second thought. It's the biggest gotcha in the universe.

In many ways it’s exactly what 10littlebullets said:

Actually, last time I watched it I found that EoT makes perfect sense if you think of the whole thing as Ten's regeneration-sickness-induced fever dream: somewhere, somewhen, he tripped over a brick and hit his head and was so disappointed at his anticlimactic regeneration that he dreamed of an epic universe-imperilling death sequence where he is the most important person in the universe, his angst is so tragic and full of pathos look at all the burdens on his poor shoulders, he gets final confirmation that he was right to blow up the Time Lords, the Master is staring into his eyes and wibbling about their lost childhood on Gallifrey, and the whole thing works by dream logic.

The whole drama of it existed only in his head. He thought he was part of a Harry Potter/Voldemort-esqu prophecy (Neither one can live while the other one survives) - like the universe had set him a test he had to pass. Or rather - he’d broken the laws of time, and he had to pay the price. But the universe isn’t sentient, and all his fancy imaginary tests were shown to be nothing but mirages.

All it boiled down to was an old man, in a glass booth. Nothing special. No one special. No complicated mind games. No epic, world altering events. Almost as mundane as tripping over a brick. Sacrificing himself for Wilf isn’t hard. It’s as fundamental and basic and simple as it gets. Open a door, push a button. THAT simple.

And this is where knowing what the whole ‘reward’ thing refers to is REALLY REALLY HELPFUL! (Dammit Rusty, why do you go cutting VITAL LINES? *grumblegrumblegrumbleWRITERSgrumble*):

Wilf: No, really, just leave me. I'm an old man, Doctor. I've had my time.

Doctor [raging at fate]: Well, exactly, look at you. Not remotely important! But me? I could do so much more! So much more! But this is what I get. My reward. And it’s not fair!

[He shoves paper off the desk as he begins to cry, gasping for breath. His eyes fill with tears and he shakes his head and sighs.]

Doctor: Oh… [heartbreakingly soft] Live too long.

For one moment - one single bright shining moment he thought he’d done it. That he’d somehow [through refusing to kill in order to save himself] managed to survive after all. That finally - finally - he’d gotten a break. And then the rug is pulled from under him... The rant makes so much more sense if seen through the filter of the cut lines. He has been fighting the desire to just take what he wants, so much so that it has swallowed up everything else... And the second he thinks it’s been given to him it is snatched away. So he breaks. He’s done everything right, and still he doesn’t get what he wants. He’s right - it isn’t fair. However, life’s tough like that. And he does claw some of it back:

Doctor [lightly]: Anyway… Don’t go thinking this is goodbye, Wilf. I’ll see you again. One more time.

Wilf [shaking head]: What do you mean? When’s that?

Doctor [unable to bring himself to explain]: Just… keep looking. I’ll be there.

Wilf: Where’re you going?

[The Doctor swallows hard, glancing around before looking back at Wilf.]

Doctor: To get my reward.

It’s costing him to hold back his regeneration, but he’ll get something - after all, he’s earned it. Is dying for it, even. It’s the most wonderful case of being utterly Time Lord Victorious, even as that part of him is dying. (Because going into that booth was the final rejection of that side.) He’s caught between worlds in a frankly unique way, and I love it to distaction. The Laws of Time (or biology, in this case) will bend to allow him to get what he wants.

And then it all burns on that final pyre, the Time Lord Victorious blazing as brightly as when he was born, until he's utterly erased... And then the Doctor finally gets what he wanted and needed for so long:



Yeah, I really love this show. ♥