I was a bit late on replying here, busy week.

I enjoyed this final episode with Rose, and it is a nice send off to her time with the Doctor. She gets to declare her love, she gets to stand up to the Daleks, and she saves the world with the doctor.

On the battle between the Cybermen and the Daleks, I enjoyed the pairing. On one hand we have an enemy that is emotionless and perfectly rational, and another whose entire philosophy is one of hatred to others. One minor complaint I have is a battle between metal beasts doesn't offer very much in the way of voice or physical acting, so it doesn't feel as energetic to watch. Getting good dialogue is important, and we had some of that. I enjoyed that the cybermen managed to trick the Daleks into identifiying themselves through wordplay. Cyber!Yvonne gave me an interesting insight, she retains much of her identity post upgrade, I think this implies she was an emotionless psycopath to begin with. It fits her character well.

In the quieter moments at Torchwood there is a lot of good acting, body movements, between the human characters. It felt very human in the face of battle. Not so much the scenes with the wider public though, cybermen wandering through empty streets, they felt a little incongruous. I noticed that Doctor was pushing Pete to join up with Jackie, which felt a little contradictory against his whole "they're not the same person" schtick in the parallel earth episode earlier in the season, but the final resolution of the family getting together again is very sweet.

I did initially think that Jake & Mickey's resistance didn't do a very good job, but I forgot about the plot point of people debating whether they were alive. Political debate leading to inaction feels pretty spot on.

Despite enjoying the run-around chaos thus far, the climax of the episode annoys me. Those damned levers, which we already know can be controlled digitally, end up causing Rose's "death". The doctor's eagerness to send rose away, feels out of character given we've seen him grow to love Rose. Even if there was a threat of her getting dragged in, the fact that a couple of magnets could save her from the void does kind of imply he could have moved her, and anyone else who wanted to stay, far away from the tower (in the tardis, for example) and they would have been fine.

All of the things I said last week still apply, really, and I won't dwell on them too much. RTD finales are messy (though this one isn't as messy as some), the production values are not great (the dimension-hopping devices look particularly cheap and plastic-y). Moving on!

The bickering between the Daleks and the Cybermen is delightful. Turning them into clowns is a pretty fun way to add some depth to two extremely one-dimensional villains.

Another way to do that? Making some of them "special," with personalities of their own. I quite like the Cult of Skaro, even though they lead to that dodgy episode of Spider-Noir in the next season.

The "reunion" between Pete and Jackie is quite good - good enough that I was able to (almost) forget that they stopped dead in a corridor in the middle of a crisis to have it. The push-and-pull of knowing that the other person both is and is not the person that they knew is well-executed, and elevated by both Camille Coduri and Shaun Dingwall.

The episode is mostly a lot of running around until the Doctor and Rose can use the ridiculous Torchwood levers to activate the deus ex machina, and I'd rather not spend much time on it, because it doesn't really matter. It's awfully convenient that Jackie was able to just run away from the Cybermen before her conversion (shame Yvonne didn't think of that), and that Yvonne was able to overcome her own conversion (Danny Pink earned it, Yvonne - you did not), and that the Daleks and Cybermen were able to be sucked back through the vortex without levelling all of London, and that the Void - explicitly stated in the last episode to contain absolutely nothing of any kind - nonetheless gives off background radiation, but that's how these things go sometimes.

And then there's the ending, after Rose is lost. The Doctor with his head pressed against the wall is iconic for a reason, and David Tennant is masterful with his stiff-upper-lipness throughout. Billie Piper also does a very good job, but I don't empathize with her as much. I'm just not enough of a Doc/Rose shipper. Murray Gold does some of his best work with the bass-heavy music track that's used in this section of the episode. Apparently the track is called "Doomsday" on the soundtrack, which...sure, makes sense. It's prompted me to look up who the heck provided the vocals for the various themes in these two series, and the answer is Melanie Pappenheim, if you're as curious as I was.

And so endeth the life of Rose Tyler, may she rest in peace.