I just watched the last episode in the current Doctor Who run. Spoilers follow.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s in the UK, I naturally watched Doctor Who, with Tom Baker for the majority of it. The details are somewhat fuzzy - unlike Blake's 7, the number of Who episodes have rather put me off buying the DVD collections - but I think I'm right in thinking the Doctor was generally of the more cerebral heroes on TV.

Before I bitch about the final episode then, I do have to say the new series has stood up very well against my memories. It's certainly been worth watching, and I'm really glad the BBC has decided to do a Christmas Special and two further series. And I'm glad it trounced the drek ITV tried to put up against it... for fuck's sake... Celebrity Wrestling.

In the final episode then, a reasonably vast army of Daleks is advancing on the Earth. The Doctor has constructed a vast gun from an orbiting broadcast station, but it's use would destroy the Earth as well as the Daleks - and he balks at using it. Rose, whom the Doctor had sent back home with the TARDIS to safety, returns to the station - flush with power after looking into the heart of the TARDIS - turns all the Daleks into dust and resurrects the recently deceased Captain Jack. The Doctor then absorbs the power from Rose and returns it to the TARDIS, forcing his dead and regeneration.

The problem I have then with this is that, essentially, they did sod all to beat the Daleks. I can't say it's a problem unique to Doctor Who; I particularly recall the endings of Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy and Fallen Dragon stories suffered in the same way as did Digital Anvil's Freelancer game. The writers put up such an impossible opponent in each case that they weren't able to write a way out of it for the heroes, so they suddenly gave them massive powers in order to win.

On the other hand, in those three cases, much of the action involved searching for the power in order to overcome said opponent. In the Doctor's case, the power just happened to have been sitting underneath him for forty years and he never used it, despite the minor cost (one of a timelord's regenerations) for the results (the Daleks all wiped out).

Actually, that's harsh - the Doctor couldn't know, since the power was pulled out of the writer's arse. But that just turns it into a simple Deus Ex Machina that makes a disatisfying end to the series.